Network restoration crews employed by wireless operators are accustomed to responding to emergencies caused by hurricanes, but the wildfires that devastated western Maui are a completely different animal.
“We’re working around the clock. We have dozens of people on the ground and we’ve deployed dozens of assets,” said Scott Agnew, head of FirstNet operations at AT&T, noting that it’s a company-wide effort involving public safety, network, retail and other teams.
FirstNet’s learnings over the past six years informs how it reacts in disasters. “Our mission is to make sure our public safety can communicate and the people can communicate with public safety,” Agnew said.
When the fires ignited last week, AT&T FirstNet had a SatCOLT, or Satellite Cell on Light Truck, in Lahaina, but as they learned more about the event, they realized they needed to transfer a lot more equipment. By that time, a lot of different organizations were trying to get to the island, which meant barges and cargo planes going to Maui quickly filled up.
“We have to leverage a lot of relationships with our partners to ensure we can get our equipment over there,” he said. It’s also a little different traveling to an island, especially when some of the equipment weighs thousands of pounds.
As of Wednesday, AT&T said it had deployed a cell tower on wheels in Lahaina. By then, it also had set up two additional SatCOLTs in the Lahaina and Ka’anapali area, for a total of three. They’re also using drones to assess damage to cell sites, as well as indoor coverage solutions and a host of other assets.
Some wondered why it took so long to get equipment to the island. Why not permanently stage it there? Agnew said that’s not practical and makes it more difficult to transfer gear to another location when it’s needed somewhere else.
“We designed this program to be able to go anywhere within 14 hours,” he said, adding that FirstNet public safety agencies have full visibility as to what’s going on, meaning they can see every site that’s impacted or has a connectivity issue. Practically and financially speaking, “you can’t design … for every possible scenario,” he said.
Another factor is the RF signals propagate differently on Maui than other, more familiar places like Florida during hurricane season. The network doesn’t behave the same way as it does on the mainland, and the networking team has to be cognizant of that. Fortunately, FirstNet had conducted training in Hawaii earlier this year and they were able to call on some of those individuals who were already on nearby islands to help in Maui.
“This is unprecedented. Can you plan for everything? No. But can you learn and get better? Yes,” Agnew said.
‘There was no notice’
The Crisis Response Team at Verizon Frontline also experienced logistics challenges.
“We’re kind of treating this similar to how we would respond to a hurricane,” said Cory Davis, AVP of Public Safety at Verizon Frontline. However, “the difference here is there was no notice.”
With a hurricane, there’s often a week to prepare. “Even some of these bigger wildfires, we start seeing them starting to burn so we can start planning. This happened so quickly that nobody had much time to plan and we had to react instantly.” Davis said.
“The logistics of getting all that equipment and all that help on the island has been challenging so we’re trying to mitigate any type of communications challenges to make sure that the first responders are able to complete their missions and obviously so the community can reach out to loved ones and tell family members that they’re OK and stay connected with the outside world,” he said.
Some of the local residents of Maui took it upon themselves to help their neighbors when they didn’t see outside recovery efforts coming fast enough. The sheer scale of devastation and the remoteness of the island made early response times more challenging.
Maui Police Department Chief John Pelletier commented that if something ever happened there, “we’re 72 hours away from help ever coming,” according to The New York Times. “And I think we proved that that’s probably pretty accurate.”
Verizon has nearly 600 portable satellite assets throughout the mainland U.S. and it had a couple staged in Maui, so they were able to get those up quickly as soon as it was safe to do so. But Davis noted there was more than one fire on the island, complicating restoration efforts.
AT&T and Verizon are both competing aggressively for business in the public safety sector, with T-Mobile being a more recent addition to the mix.
But Davis also said they all have to communicate with one another during these emergencies and if a competitor needs bandwidth, “we will help them and we have in the past.” During these kinds of situations, “everybody is wearing the same jersey and we all have the same mission and purpose – at least, from my group, that’s so those first responders can communicate and get their job done.”
Emotional toll
Shannon Browning, FirstNet Response Operations Group (ROG) section chief at AT&T, said they also have to consider the emotional impact on the first responders and the people on the frontline. That’s why it’s so important to have ROG the therapy dog on the ground. The death toll continues to rise and people are seeing things they normally wouldn’t see “at an exponential level.”
Named Hoku, the therapy dog is on the island to visit any agency that requests a visit from the dog, who essentially provides a calming effect in the midst of so much pain and anxiety. Through a partnership with Global Medical Response (GMR), FirstNet has access to 37 of these dogs, all of them labradoodles, who can respond when and where they’re needed.
“It’s not just technology or network. It’s really the whole picture. We are a public safety company,” Agnew said when describing the role of the dogs. For added bonus: “They’re darn fluffy and cute.”