In A Crisis, Will Your Phone Work?

FCC Is Asked To Require Emergency Voicemail, Call-Forwarding

(CBS/AP)  Kids weren't the only ones unable to reconnect when the winds died down.

NCMEC's Katrina/Rita hotline also logged 12,342 reports of missing adults, forwarded to the National Center for Missing Adults for investigation.

Johnnie Marchand, a hospital worker who fled Algiers, La., wound up in Waco, Texas, with not a clue as to whether her 76-year-old father, who lived in New Orleans, had gotten out alive.

"I couldn't get through to him... there was nothing I could do," she says, remembering three weeks of calling everyone she could think of and staring at the TV, hoping to see his face. "I'm hoping and praying... looking at the Convention Center, trying to see if I see my dad's face in that crowd."

"He wasn't in that Superdome. He wasn't being carted from dome to dome," says Marchand, who finally got the good news that he was doing volunteer work with a church group he'd met while evacuated to Arkansas.

She's now a job trainer at Mission Waco, a non-profit community outreach organization that helped out in the search for her father.

Voicemail or call forwarding would have been a big help, says Marchand. "It would have been such a relief, and so much stress off me."

Stress could be reduced for many evacuees, says Pulver.com attorney Jonathan Askin - who drafted the FCC petition for Pulver and Evslin, who are both involved in VoIp phone service over the Internet.

The petition, available online, is now in the public comment period - meaning that consumers have until April 27th to log on to the FCC web site, type in the petition's "proceeding identification number" - RM-11327 - and send a message on why the proposal is a good or bad idea.

Askin notes that the FCC worked quickly after Katrina, within days, to temporarily suspend its rules against switching phone numbers from one geographic area to another - allowing customers to take their phone numbers with them to their new locations.

The petition, says Askin, seeks to go beyond impromptu solutions in the heat of a crisis and instead set up, in advance, procedures for emergency communications that everyone will both know about and be able to rely on.

Technology, he argues, makes this a low cost solution to a serious problem.

The added cost of emergency voicemail and call forwarding, says Askin, would be "almost negligible. These services are minor software changes."

BellSouth is already on the hook for the cost of rebuilding after Katrina, a bill it expects to come in at between $700 million and $900 million.

BellSouth lawyers are studying the emergency voicemail and call forwarding proposal and expect to provide a formal response to the FCC, but company spokesman Bill McCloskey says new government-imposed rules may not be the answer.

"Many of the things that are proposed are things that we already do and that customers find useful," says Bill McCloskey. "In any disaster, since no two are exactly alike, it is essential that flexibility be available to respond to circumstances as they exist on the ground."

BellSouth also has proposals for how to do things better next time around. They include tax credits for companies rebuilding after Katrina, procedures to make fuel available for powering phone networks, improved security for phone company employees and facilities, designation of a single radio frequency to allow emergency personnel to communicate with each other, and the inclusion of telecommunications service providers in planning and responding to disasters.