Boston Marathon Bombing Communication

878 Words2 Pages

All disaster and crisis events are exceptionally dynamic, creating a physical, emotional, mental, and social disorder. In particular, terrorist attacks have risen in both frequency and visibility as a worldwide phenomenon (Schwarz et al., p.85, 2016). Due to the pervasive nature, the effects of terrorism have impacted on all of humankind. Generally, terror attacks require different communication approaches than natural disasters such as a hurricane or an earthquake because they elicit intense public reactions and may overwhelm local response capabilities. In such emergencies, communication is very critical in all phases of disaster management. Effective communication includes an array of measures to manage risks to both the community and the …show more content…

In the minutes and hours following the bombing, communication was vital to ensuring all of the challenges and elusive tasks faced by authorities and the communities were met. While there were challenges with ensuring effective communication during the disaster, there was also an importance of social media such as Twitter as a method of policing tool. Despite the fact that communication played an important role on disaster response, there should have been more focus on the city’s disaster preparedness prior to the Boston Marathon bombing. To further illustrate this, there was failure of existing communication infrastructure and misinformation being spread through traditional media …show more content…

Since wireless towers are not designed to handle an immense amount of call and texting volume, call blocking can occur when there are too many phone calls made within a certain geographic location. However, cellular carriers have been working on expanding additional technology such as routing overflow call handling to nearby Wi-Fi networks (Farrell, 2013). As well, there has been advancement in the setting of mass-casualty incidents, with the advent of computer miniaturization. For instance, investigators have been working on local area networks to improve geoposition tracking in which ambulances can have a better access to wireless communication devices to the Internet to transmit and relay clinical data for emergency disasters (Chan et al., p.1230, 2004). During these situations, it is recommended altogether to use texting or e-mail when contacting loved ones in the affected area as messages can be queued up and delivered as the capacity becomes more available (Stone, 2013). While there are suggestions of adding radios and towers to amplify connections between the networks, a vast majority of that extra capacity would be wasted which can entail great expense and cause environmental issues (Stone, 2013). Unfortunately, the tradeoff between cost and capacity in today’s networks are not properly designed to provide enough capacity during

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