BATON ROUGE – As hurricanes Gustav and Ike swamped coastal communities and knocked out power to more than 1 million homes and businesses, phone and radio lines of first-responders largely held in the first true test of the communications grid developed after Hurricane Katrina.Police, search-and-rescue teams and emergency operations workers could talk to each other, radio-in damage assessments and call for help.That’s a far cry from 2005 when Katrina and Rita leveled communications systems. Portable radios and phones failed, isolating communities for days and making first-responders unaware of the scope of the devastation.The collapse prompted a $95 million upgrade in communications infrastructure.The new system wasn’t without disruptions, including failure of two radio towers for both Gustav and Ike. But backups were quickly dropped into affected areas. State officials said they never lost total communication with any parish.”It was nothing like Katrina. During Katrina, in Washington Parish, the state literally had no communication with the parish for three days,” said Brant Mitchell, assistant deputy director for “interoperability” — essentially, ensuring communications systems work — for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.”In every parish, we had communication during Gustav and Ike,” he said.Louisiana poured state and federal dollars into a heftier radio system, a 700-megahertz design with greater bandwidth to handle more calls and radio traffic than the system that overloaded during Katrina and Rita. Participation on the 700 system is voluntary by responder agencies. But each parish received at least 28 radios — at a minimum cost of $2,000 apiece — to talk on the new system.That made the difference for Ike, said Clifton Hebert, emergency operations director for Cameron Parish in southwest Louisiana, smacked by Ike’s 14-foot storm surge.Though two towers were temporarily knocked out by Ike, Hebert said a mobile tower was sent in and State Police brought in more radios so local officials could communicate.”That equipment was able to get back up and running pretty quickly,” Hebert said. “We never lost complete communications with the state.”By comparison, during Rita, low-lying Cameron was isolated.”During Rita, we lost all of our communications, all of them. We couldn’t communicate outside of the parish for several days,” Hebert said.Nearly five dozen radio towers dot the landscape of mainly south Louisiana, with 30,000 radios in the system, Mitchell said. The state is expanding the system, adding towers in north Louisiana. Mitchell said most of those would be in place by Nov. 1.Besides handing out 28 radios per parish, the state emergency preparedness office keeps a cache of loaner radios on hand and a backup of 60 satellite phones in case all else fails, Mitchell said. Hundreds of radios were loaned to local first-responders for Gustav and Ike. Communications systems worked well enough that the only satellite phone checked out by a parish official wasn’t used, Mitchell said.Traffic was significant: More than 2.4 million transmissions were logged for Gustav, in the 10-day period from Aug. 27 to Sept. 7, Mitchell said. Gustav struck on Sept. 1.But the system had two major problems for Gustav and Ike, Mitchell said.—3.7 percent of attempted radio calls ran into busy signals. Mitchell said the state was exploring ways to increase capacity on towers with the largest number of busy signals.—20 of the 55 towers on the 700-megahertz system at some point only allowed users within range of the individual tower to talk to each other. A user in the Baton Rouge area, for example, wouldn’t have been able to talk to New Orleans if the local tower developed the problem. Mitchell said the state was considering ways to build more backup into the system.State officials weren’t the only emergency responders who learned lessons from Katrina and Rita.Rebecca Broussard, director of the Vermilion Parish emergency operations center, said communications went smoothly during Gustav and Ike. That wasn’t the case during Rita.The new state system worked, though Broussard said the parish still keeps older radios and a satellite radio.”We have backups for the backups now,” she said, laughing. “I got more radios than I think I want to look at.”