Hurricanes Tested 911, Show Need for NG-911, Local Officials Say

When major hurricanes disrupted 911 communications in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands last summer, systems held up in many places and backup procedures were effective, said 911 and government officials in interviews. But next-generation 911, more resilient buildings and other enhancements could save lives in future disasters, they said.

Lost location data slowed response in hardest-hit areas, said officials. Until NG-911 is rolled out, systems can’t transfer that information when a call is rerouted from a damaged public safety answering point. Carriers should give PSAPs quick initial notification of outages, even before they're confirmed, the FCC Public Safety Bureau said Tuesday (see 1801020041).

“If you know exactly where to go, it makes a huge difference,” said Texas Commission on State Emergency Communications Executive Director Kelli Merriweather. “If you’re guessing or if you get a directional on a street wrong … that costs minutes and that can be a big problem.”

A 911 center was “completely down” in St. Croix, and a St. Thomas call center couldn’t retrieve location information for wireless or automatic number and location information for VoIP callers, the FCC said in a Sept. 22 report on Maria, at around the time of the hurricane. The FCC reported the U.S. Virgin Islands call centers as operational Thursday, saying location data from wireless and VoIP “has been intermittently available.” The agency didn’t comment for this story.

Texas

Texas 911 “was overwhelmed, but the system worked as designed,” Merriweather said.

Hurricane Harvey knocked out PSAPs in the southern coastal area near Rockport and Port Aransas, where the storm made landfall, Merriweather said. Calls were successfully rerouted to Corpus Christi, but location data was lost in the transfer due to technical limits of pre-NG-911 systems, she said. The damaged PSAPs are receiving calls again after construction of temporary buildings and telecom companies deploying 911 trucks into the area that provide connectivity, she said.

Harvey didn’t physically damage Houston's 911 centers, but spiking calls overwhelmed call takers there and some other cities, Merriweather said. “They just answered the calls as fast as they could.” NG-911 would let PSAPs distribute call volume across more sites, she said. Since not all calls were emergencies, the load may have been reduced if public safety used social networks to distribute information, she said.

Coordination among officials was inefficient, Merriweather said. “We all do work together, but during a crisis it’s hard to find each other.” Emails and calls exchanged during the response might have been reduced if officials used an online platform to share updates, she said.

Virgin Islands

Irma and Maria destroyed the 911 PSAP in the Virgin Islands, Public Services Commissioner Johann Clendenin said. Power outages and extensive damage to fiber, wireless towers and poles carrying copper lines also disrupted communications, he said. Early on, before wireless services were restored, emergency communications relied on ham radios, he said.

“We couldn’t get the calls in through the PSAP,” so the territory had to route calls through mainland cities, Clendenin said. The Virgin Islands doesn’t have NG-911, and software limitations prevented sending location information, he said. The lack of location data was made worse by the islands’ lacking a street numbering system, especially for first responders from other parts of the country who didn’t know the area, the commissioner said.

Virgin Islands residents don’t depend on 911 for emergency help, and dialing it may not even occur to some people, Clendenin said. “That doesn’t work here. Your neighbors help you. … Calling 911 in an island community where people stick together is a luxury we can’t afford.”

No U.S. territory should “be deprived because of the cost” of 911 systems and other important infrastructure, Clendenin said. “There’s a responsibility by the United States government to get us stable and in compliance with what the standards are in the rest of America. … We need to have [911] among so many other things that we need,” and the federal government shouldn’t allow the Virgin Islands to exist without them, he said.

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico’s 911 system didn’t fail during or after Irma and Maria, said a spokeswoman for the territory’s Department of Public Safety, saying the agency took 8,000 calls Sept. 20 during the hurricane.

As Maria knocked out wireline and wireless telecom services across the island, call volume to 911 decreased and response agencies’ telecommunications failed, she said. Call takers received such calls “but we could not get through to the response agencies to transfer the emergency calls so they could go to the emergency,” she said. That meant some emergencies couldn’t be answered, she said.

“Our main problem was with the lack of electricity and the use of generators,” the DPS spokeswoman said. There were power failures at the main and secondary PSAPs, she said. But Puerto Rico maintained 100 percent uptime due to the redundancy of the subsystem and 911 call geo-diversification, she said.

Agencies that are part of the 911 system "must have reliable telecommunications services,” the Puerto Rico official said. “This means having redundancies, undergrounded telecommunications and backup systems.” Responder locations “need to be evaluated to make sure they are not exposed to flooding” and can stand up to a Category 5 hurricane, and “they need to have electrical generator sub-systems capable of providing power for at least a two-week period without maintenance and fuel,” she said.

Puerto Rico isn’t at a disadvantage compared with states for 911 service, the DPS spokeswoman said. “We do, however, need to improve our primary and secondary PSAP’s locations and update our technical capabilities.” Puerto Rico needs funding to enhance resiliency and provide interoperable radio communications for all public safety agencies, she said.

Florida

“Hurricane Irma challenged Florida’s 911 community, and the system performed well, verifying the resilience of the 911 systems,” a Florida Department of Management Services spokeswoman said.

The state had varying degrees of damage to 911 call centers, and backup plans and local county mutual aid agreements were activated effectively, she said. Responding to power and communications outages in the southwest part of the state where the storm made landfall, Florida rerouted 911 calls to neighboring counties according to plans by telecom providers and counties, she said. Northern and eastern Florida counties, as well as Georgia and Tennessee, sent teams of telecommunicators to support the most-affected counties, she said.

Irma damaged fiber and telecom facilities, preventing people from using cellphones and landlines, said Monroe County Emergency Communications Director Laura White. One of three PSAPs in the county evacuated and forwarded calls to another PSAP in the area, she said. Service was never unavailable, and the county began taking calls again through a backup PSAP after five days, she said.

A hardened emergency operations center rated for Category 5, with a backup communications center, would possibly have allowed telecommunicators to remain at posts during the storm, White said. Monroe County’s emergency operations center (EOC) was rated Category 3, she said.

The Lee County Emergency Dispatch Center and local 911 centers remained operational and took calls from other Florida counties when their systems were overwhelmed or failed, the county's spokeswoman said. Location services were unavailable at some centers because phone carriers didn’t pass the information onto the PSAP, but there weren’t any hardware failures, she said. The county is NG-911-ready but hasn’t chosen a network vendor for final integration, she said.

Editor's Note: This is Part II of an occasional series of stories on 911 problems. Part I showed reliability problems from using pre-internet infrastructure and from institutional complexity, insufficient staffing and funding (see 1709080018).