COMMUNICATION NETWORKSFuture-Proofing Our Emergency Networks
Climate change is heightening the intensity and frequency of severe weather around the world, making hurricanes more dangerous, increasing extreme heat, intensifying wildfires, and risking greater natural disasters. It’s a hard reality that the essential technology we rely on to get in touch with family, friends, and emergency services during a crisis is not guaranteed.
“In case of emergency, network unavailable.”
Climate change is heightening the intensity and frequency of severe weather around the world, making hurricanes more dangerous, increasing extreme heat, intensifying wildfires, and risking greater natural disasters. It’s a hard reality that the essential technology we rely on to get in touch with family, friends, and emergency services during a crisis is not guaranteed. Natural disasters will leave many more lives at risk, especially if we can’t increase the resiliency of essential telecommunications network infrastructure to reach people when they need help.
In September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, taking an estimated 2,975 to 4,645 lives. Part of what exacerbated the death toll was the hurricane’s impact on people’s ability to reach each other and get help: Maria destroyed 95.2 percent of cell sites and damaged internet and underwater cables so badly that many Puerto Ricans were left without cable or wireline service for more than a year after.
Future-proofing our networks and making them more resilient to coming natural disasters will help save lives and prevent the total devastation of communications infrastructure from events like Hurricane Maria. A baseline step would be to require that all providers participate in the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS). Created in response to Hurricane Katrina, the DIRS is a web-based system that allows wireline, wireless, broadcast, cable, interconnected VoIP, and broadband service providers with a single, coordinated, consistent process to report their communications infrastructure status information during disasters. Through the DIRS, the FCC can collect data that can inform restoration efforts by federal partners and help the FCC assess communications reliability during disasters. It will ensure transparency about what’s happening where, and provide consistent network status information to federal emergency management officials, who can then act where needed. Information collected through DIRS can be bolstered by data from the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS), a mandatory collection of information about network outages lasting for more than 30 minutes. The FCC should also issue rules and establish a regulatory resiliency framework to minimize the number, duration, and impact of future communications network outages. The agency can examine previous network failures, like what happened in Puerto Rico, to figure out what the underlying causes of prolonged outages are, and use that information to shape their rulemaking.
