This commentary is by Michael Fannin, who has been emergency management director for the town of Tinmouth for 25 years. He has served in a variety of elected and appointed positions over the past 38 years, and has worked as a self-employed stone carver and building restorer for 49 years in Vermont.
I want to thank Tom Evslin in his June 8 commentary on “Starlink” for mentioning the fragility of cellular communications during natural disasters.
He mentions the failures of cellular communications during Hurricane Irene. Vermont is not alone in this. Superstorm Sandy caused the loss of 60% of cell service in New York City and the New Jersey area.
Here in Vermont, emergency response operations are shifting to AT&T’s FirstNet cellular system, which is designed to handle emergency response using the cellular network. It has been known to fail.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana wrote to complain to AT&T about its FirstNet system. “I write to you today regarding AT&T’s failure to maintain network operations during Hurricane Ida, including the emergency first responder systems. When Louisianans tried to make calls to 911, the calls couldn’t be completed.”
Working in emergency management, I’ve been leery of Vermont’s decision to adopt this system since we were first introduced to it by AT&T’s reps at a regional emergency management meeting in Rutland, where the presenters couldn’t even get their PowerPoint presentation to work.
It seemed to me that our old systems were more reliable and we probably didn’t need to put up dozens of new cell towers and feed a lot of money into AT&T bank accounts.
Mr. Evslin puts a lot of stock in Elon Musk’s Starlink and I’m glad that it was of some use in Ukraine. However, at closer look, it has its own problems with consistency. There are even websites like downdetector.com dedicated to monitoring outages in the system, which are common. It’s worth a look just for the comment section!
Add to this the problem we have with modem batteries in the fiber-optic systems quickly dying during long-term power outages and our situation becomes even more dire. When faced with a wave of complaints, the FCC decided that the “onus is on the consumer” to deal with this problem.
Again, why was this half-baked technology allowed to be built out with built-in problems? In our town, since the onus is on us, we are proposing a system where people with generators volunteer their phones during power outages for emergency calls only.
It seems to me that these technologies are being used without due diligence in a rush to profitability while being enabled by the FCC, which is run by former representatives of the cellular industry. This has left us with undependable systems unrealistically expected to improve emergency response.
