"Soon after the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Brad Morrell deployed from Utah to New York City as part of an urban search and rescue team.
Aboard the military airlift transporting rescuers, Brad remembers seeing otherwise empty skies except for the fighter jets escorting their plane. When they got to the fallen towers, the scene was unlike anything else he and his teammates had experienced.
In the initial days, cell service was non-existent, land-mobile radios were down, and repeaters to boost signals weren’t working. The only communications available to Brad and his team were two-way pagers they brought from Utah.
“We knew that comms was an issue. For the first few days, we couldn't talk from Ground Zero back to our base of operations,” said Brad who now serves as the FirstNet Authority’s Director of Network and Technology Operations.
“After a few days, we got some repeaters up. But communications at Ground Zero was essentially being done the old-fashioned way. It was just face-to-face or yelling across the way. It hampered operations for sure.”
The tragedies of September 11 revealed fundamental problems with communication systems then used by our nation’s first responders. Radios relied on by police, fire, and paramedics did not easily operate across different agencies. Land and mobile phone lines were overwhelmed by a high volume of calls. First responders struggled to communicate with each other.
At the FirstNet Authority, our story is indelibly linked to September 11, 2011. Our mission is to oversee a communications network – FirstNet – that was created in light of the events of 9/11 to give American first responders a reliable nationwide broadband network..."
9/11 and First Responders
