The IEEE Communications Society is offering for free the article, “A Broadband Wireless Communications System for Emergency Management.” This will give you a peek at what academics are working on as far as emergency communications is concerned. As you’ll note, there is no mention of amateur radio.

The abstract reads:

Wireless communications have received much attention during the last decades due to easy implementation, the possibility of delivering multimedia services to rural communities, and the suitability for public safety and for communicating in emergency situations. In particular, a wireless network designed for an emergency scenario must be capable of monitoring sensitive areas and must enable people to connect immediately after a disaster. This article discusses the main features of a wireless network that aims to interconnect several heterogeneous systems and provide multimedia access to groups of people to better monitor a specific area, to have a fast response in case of a disaster, and to efficiently
coordinate all of the forces during the disaster management phase.

One idea that I thought interesting is that they make provisions for deploying andn acquiring data a variety of sensors to monitor conditions at the emergency site. I’m not a big EMCOMMM guy, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that in any amateur emergency communications plans.