Establishing and accessing a reliable communication infrastructure at crisis site is a challenging research problem. Failure in communication infrastructure and information exchange impedes the early response efforts resulting in huge loss of lives and economical impacts. Reliability, robustness, interoperability and minimum interdependencies are specific requirements of communication technology within the context of emergency applications. We present the real measurements obtained over the deployment of a quickly configurable and easily reconfigurable wireless mesh test bed at disaster site. This is followed by an analytical discussion of the important observations concerning the factors that impact performance or cause bottlenecks.