"In May 2004, former DHS Secretary Ridge announced the launch of RapidCom, an initiative to help improve capabilities for immediate, incident-level, interoperable emergency communications in ten high-threat urban areas. The SAFECOM program led the effort, working in cooperation with federal partners such as the DHS Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP), Department of Justice (DOJ) 25 Cities program, and the National Institute of Justice CommTech program to provide assistance to the following urban areas: (1) Boston, Massachusetts (2) Chicago, Illinois (3) Houston, Texas (4) Jersey City, New Jersey (5) Los Angeles, California (6) Miami, Florida (7) National Capital Region (8) New York, New York (9) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10) San Francisco, California Program Description - RapidCom has provided assistance to incident commanders to improve their abilities to adequately communicate with each other and their respective command center within one hour of a major incident. RapidCom NCR's main function was to provide emergency-level communications interoperability assistance". (DHS, National Capital Region Coordination First Annual Report, 2005, p. 82)