Yesterday’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake that originated in central Virginia disrupted cell phone networks for several hours on Tuesday afternoon along much of the east coast. The event evoked memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which clogged networks on a much larger scale. Since public safety and commercial networks operate on the same spectrum the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a statement asking the public to utilize text messaging and email to communicate to keep the lines open for emergency responders.

This random event highlights the need for state and local public safety authorities to have increased capacity for communications. ICMA, the Big 7, and other organizations have worked to support initiatives to allocate the D-block portion of the radio spectrum to state and local public safety. The D-block would provide public safety with an additional dedicated 10-MHz of spectrum, which would support increased capacity in data and video technology as well as the ability to send and receive calls at any time.

The random nature of yesterday’s event proved that the need for increased public safety communications capacity can come at any time, and in any form. Without the D-block allocation, the next potential incident could bring about similar results and may lead to less effective disaster response.