Harris communications equipment is providing telephone, fax and vital telemedicine video transmission for this medical MASH unit near Gulfport, Mississippi.

Employees of Harris Maritime Communication Services are currently on the Mississippi Gulf Coast setting up satellite communications equipment to provide emergency communication support for the recovery effort. The equipment will provide service for phone calls, data, internet services, faxes and vital telemedicine video transmitted from the devastated areas to emergency managers, decision makers and worried families all over the world. Harris MCS crews are veterans of similar operations for FEMA, Hurricane Andrew recovery, Bosnia airlift, World Health Organization and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Dr. Andy Clark, president of MCS, has just returned from the Gulf Coast and filed this report:

I'm incredibly proud of my guys — they are making a huge difference. Nobody there had these communications capabilities, and I have no doubt we have contributed to saving some lives. The worst hit area we got to (and I think the worst destruction along the coast) was at the small town of Pass Christian. Ironically, I had lived there briefly in the early '70s while I was working in the offshore oilfields. Residents are still not being allowed in - only emergency vehicles, of which we qualify. The governor of Mississippi turned over all responsibility for the six lower counties to Jeb Bush and the Florida Emergency Operations Center to run, including law enforcement, communications, logistics, sanitation, etc.

When we got to Pass Christian, there were a few law enforcement folks slowly picking their way through the rubble on ATVs (all terrain vehicles). However, these officers also were from Florida and didn't know where anything was. We finally found a local policeman and I asked him if he knew anyone named Dubison (the guy I worked with and shared a trailer with some 30 years ago). As it turned out, Dubison is the name of the Chief of Police. He is a cousin of my old pal, but the relationship was close enough to grease the skids for getting us to all the places we needed to be and the designation of VIP status among the first responders there.

We took some remarkable photos of the area. Our team also was "taken onboard" by a U.S. Army team that had set up a mobile comms unit next to the one remaining gas station (now a police station). The soldiers had a truck full of Harris RF Comm gear, so when they saw our Harris hats we were immediately welcomed. They were anxious to get some Harris hats to replace their camo fatigue caps, and we were only too glad to oblige them.

Mike Estes (behind the post) of Harris Maritime Communication Services (MCS) instructs Tommy Mach of RF Comm on the assembly of the MCS satellite communications dish at a Mobile Medical Unit near Gulfport, Mississippi.

Our bivouac is a handful of tents along side the perimeter road around the prison in Gulfport, MS (though we seldom get back there except to load-out another suite of satcom gear). We're rotating our MCS specialists back home to try to keep from getting them sick and/or burned-out. Sanitation is as crucial as it is difficult. It is critical to have at least two of them up there to get these systems on line. The folks sent up from Palm Bay and Evans Road facilities have already mastered the mechanics of assembling the dish, but the satcom and network part is not something quickly picked up, particularly under these conditions (some sites require banks of IP phones that need programming as well as internet, telemedicine feeds, etc). This served as an opportunity to get to work side by side with some of our colleagues from RF Comm – they grow 'em tough up there in Rochester! And I don't want to forget to mention the 'heroes' on the Melbourne end of this operation, as it takes highly skilled, versatile (and sleep-deprived) engineers, technicians, logistics and finance folks at our Network Operations Center at all hours to make these systems work.

By today, we should have 6 of the 12 satcom systems we deployed up and operational on the Gulf Coast. The one at the medical MASH unit is particularly heartening to see in operation. We gave the doctors and nurses a bunch of those Harris business development giveaway AM/FM radios. No sooner than we were headed back to the truck, I looked around the parking lot and saw all these kids who had just left the triage unit with Harris radios up to their ears. That was a good moment.

<< Back to the Hurricane Relief Efforts page.

Top