Officials Say FCC Information Sometimes Didn't Tell Whole Story During Recent Disasters

Officials from Puerto Rico, Texas and the U.S. Coast Guard said last year’s massive storms showed the fault lines in the communications infrastructure. Information supplied by the FCC sometimes didn’t keep up with the disasters as they unfolded, speakers said during an FCC workshop Friday. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC wants to learn from what happened last year. Puerto Rico is struggling to recover from Maria, which hit it in September (see 1803160051).

The hurricane season last year “escalated rather quickly,” said Justin Cain, deputy chief of the FCC Public Safety Bureau: “It imposed a number of challenges for which we may or may not have been prepared. … It’s difficult to be prepared for every scenario.”

“We understood that we were prepared for the hurricane season,” said Alexandria Fernández-Nevarro, member of the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board. “We had precautions in place. We had satellite phones. We had agreements with private companies. We had agreement within the government. Nothing prepared us for the reality of a Category 5 hurricane.” A day after the storm, the authority found it had lost governmental and private communications, Fernández-Nevarro said. “Until that time people didn’t realize that telecommunication is an essential service and should be prioritized the same as water and electricity.” If anything good came out of the disaster it’s that telecom is now recognized in Puerto Rican law as an essential service, she said.

Sandra Torres López, chair of the regulatory board, agreed Puerto Rico wasn’t prepared for Maria. Thirty percent of the telecom infrastructure there today still depends on electric generators, she said. “Like the island that we are, we had a challenge because the ports were closed,” she said. Food, gas, diesel, building materials -- nothing was coming to the island in the days after the storm, she said.

Texas tried to prepare for Harvey, but it moved from a thunderstorm to a Category 4 hurricane in a matter of days, said Todd Spencer, program coordinator-response for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “We had already made contact with all the major carriers,” Spencer said. “Where are you pre-staging your Colts [cells on light trucks] and your portable trucks and generators? … We had a list of that already.” The department also had a plan for going in after the storm hit.

One of the biggest problems Texas encountered was that information from the FCC didn’t keep up with events, Spencer said. The FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) would report that cell coverage was zero in an area, but the department knew because carrier officials were in the command center that Colts already were sent in, he said. “The report was still saying there’s an outage,” he said. “We need to know that information. If we hadn’t had [the carriers] in the room we wouldn’t have known it from the reports.”

The overload of emergency call centers after Harvey meant an unexpected surge of emergency calls to the U.S. Coast Guard, said Cmdr. Robert Landolfi. The Coast Guard is used to dealing with marine distress calls, not the kinds of calls fielded by public safety answering points (PSAPs), he said. “We’re not prepared or trained or staffed to prepared to handle those,” he said. Local Coast Guard sectors work with 911 call centers, but not at the level needed given the size of the problem on the Gulf Coast, Landolfi said. “We had a few hundred people throughout the Coast Guard lined up to take these calls and we realized pretty quickly that we are not a trained 911 response center.”

“The architecture of the 911 system does not lend itself to transferring a call to the U.S. Coast Guard” and that’s an anomaly, said Jay English, APCO chief technology officer. But Harvey caused massive problems, he said. “The PSAP wasn’t down, it was gone,” he said. When a PSAP fails, calls are transferred to nearby call centers, English said. “When your rollover … plan is one or two PSAPs next door to you and they’re gone too, there is nowhere for that call to go.” English warned, “you can only plan so far.” The Coast Guard stepped up “and thank goodness they were there, but that shouldn’t happen,” he said.

Former FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani, who was at the workshop, told us she’s not sure whether FCC systems have improved since Maria hit her native Puerto Rico. "It's hard to say whether the FCC’s response to the Puerto Rico disaster has been adequate because of the lack of transparency," she said. The FCC may be working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, local governments and local industry, but it has done little public outreach "to hear first hand how the collapse of the telecommunications systems affected them during and after the 2017 storms," she said.

"The FCC has failed to do sufficient public outreach in Spanish, the predominant language on the island," Tristani said. "At the very least, the commission should have and should still conduct field hearings on the island regarding the catastrophic storms." Tristani said she's not sure the commonwealth has a disaster preparedness plan addressing telecom yet. Torres declined to comment.

Pai said the information presented at the workshop will add to the record, building on comments filed on a December public notice asking how the FCC performed during the 2017 hurricane season. Pai said he visited communities hit by Harvey, Irma and Maria to see the devastation firsthand, recalling a visit to Utuado, Puerto Rico, with Torres.

“The people of Utuado stepped up, they cleared the roads to get the repair trucks in so they could once again be connected with the rest of the world,” Pai said. “Stories from places like Utuado illustrate, to me at least, why today’s workshop is so important. The ability to communicate information is critical during emergencies. It’s what helps us warn communities, dispatch assistance and more.” But Pai conceded “many communities are still struggling to gain some semblance of normality … all while they look over their shoulder waiting for the next hurricane season.”

The FCC’s DIRS provides a “snapshot” of the state of communications at a given time, said Jarrett Devine, regional emergency communications coordinator, for Region I of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The information “has to inform the response,” Devine said. “It has to provide the information for responders. It has to enable us to make better decisions as we’re responding.”

Following Maria, DIRS provided basic information on areas with wireless coverage and broadcasters still on the air, Jarrett said. “As we took those two data sets and overlaid them, you could see areas that were able to receive AM transmissions and areas that were able to receive wireless emergency alerts,” he said. “Then you saw pockets that didn’t have any coverage. … That data told us where we could not touch our population.”