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Telecom Tweets of the Week: Waterlogged by Harvey

Kelly Hill
By Kelly Hill
Opinionpublic safety

It was a rough week for southeast Texas, as Hurricane Harvey slammed into the coast and dropped an unprecedented amount of water — more than 50 inches, in some places. The pictures and video posted to social media by residents and journalists attempted to show both the scale of the destruction and the heroism of the folks on the ground (and in the air).

It’s notable, though, that images like those and many more could even be posted. The general consensus seems to be that on the whole, the cellular networks weathered the storm relatively well, given the scale of the storm.

While the Houston market itself seems to have fared pretty well in terms of service — when I checked in with the carriers on Monday, they reported that 5% or less of their sites in Houston were down — areas outside the city, particularly hard-hit cities like Rockport, still had issues.

The Federal Communications Commission has been keeping track, and commissioners are taking notes.

The conversations I’ve heard in the context of the First Responders Network Authority over the years have basically been that in a major disaster — flood, hurricane, earthquake, you name it — you are inevitably going to lose some sites depending on how bad the destruction is. So you’d best have deployables ready to be trucked in as soon as the waters start to recede, which it appears the carriers had on-hand and pre-staged. Communications lessons are always one of the post-disaster areas that get scrutinized, and it will be interesting to see what lessons are learned from Harvey — and if carriers either voluntarily or by regulation end up having to do more site hardening.

Harris County, by the by, is one of the FirstNet early builder projects that has a Band 14 network and some devices available for first responders. I was interested to see that they were prepping Band 14 equipment for hurricane recovery work:

Yet even as Harvey recovery gets started, some meteorologists are already fretting that another major hurricane in the works could hit the U.S. It’s too early to tell and there are disagreements between the two major hurricane models on a projected path, but Hurricane Irma became a Class 3 storm in the Atlantic yesterday and is making its way westward. But after this week, the tweet below is probably enough to make anyone on the southeastern seaboard nervous. And even if Irma misses the U.S., we’re still only partway through hurricane season.

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ABOUT AUTHOR

Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill
Kelly reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. Follow her on Twitter: @khillrcr

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