Carr Calls for Greater Coordination Between Power Companies and Communications Providers

The current flooding in central Texas, which has led to more than 80 deaths, has been “heartbreaking” but hasn’t had a major effect on communications facilities, Carr said, adding that FCC is monitoring events there.

“As we head into another hurricane season, we thought this was an opportune time” to hold a public discussion, Carr said. “The season is just getting underway, and the FCC is focused on making sure that our communications providers have all the best practices in place and that our 911 call operators are able to coordinate recovery efforts,” he said. “Calls to 911 always have to go through.”

Historically, the single most important focus after a disaster was restoring power, Carr said. “Increasingly, obviously, connectivity is of paramount importance,” requiring a balance between restoring power and communications. That means that crews from different sectors and jurisdictions coming into an area need to know one another, he said.

Communications networks have proved resilient in recent storms, but there has been a “sawtooth pattern” of service restoration, Carr said. “There will be some restoration of service, and then we’ll lose service.” One reason for that, he said, is fiber cuts as workers clear roads or as electric companies restore power lines. “The FCC has been working for years to try to improve coordination,” he added. “I think we’re getting there” but continuing those efforts is critical.

Mutual Aid

NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield said telecom providers don’t have the same mutual aid agreements seen in the power industry. Community-based providers tend to work together during disasters, “but the communications side does not have that established mutual aid format,” she said.

Mutual aid is critical in the power industry, agreed Drew Preston, Duke Energy's federal government affairs director. He cited a storm in Florida last season, during which power companies put 50,000 workers in the field, including 16,000 from Duke. Duke works with municipal and co-op utilities, even if it doesn’t have formal aid agreements, he said, adding that when utilities restore power poles, they sometimes can’t tell which provider is located on them.

Steven Morris, NCTA vice president and deputy general counsel, said that while “a lot of us compete with each other,” those responding to disasters “are pretty good about putting that aside and working together.” But he acknowledged that companies still don’t like to share details about their networks with competitors. “We’ve sort of overcome that to some point,” he said. “Mutual aid requires a lot of trust” and “there’s a lot of progress we can make.”

But public safety really doesn’t care about industry competition, said Jack Varnado, 911 director at the Livingston Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff's Office. “We care about getting the public served.” Providers have to understand that the information they share won’t be used against them, he said: “The trust has to be there.”

“We work every day with the local utilities” but don’t always have the same strong relationships with telecom providers, Varnado added.

State coordinators don’t necessarily require the data that companies think they do, said North Carolina Statewide Interoperability Coordinator Greg Hauser, adding that they get the data they need from the FCC. One thing he does need to know, Hauser said, is when things aren’t going well during restoration. If it's known that “we’re thumbs-down in these areas … we can work with that from a planning perspective.”

Scott Aaronson, the Edison Electric Institute's senior vice president of energy security and industry operations, quoted former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson's saying that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Utilities know “we’re going to get punched in the mouth,” but having relationships with other providers before that happens is “incredibly important,” Aaronson said. Utilities and communications providers also still don’t completely understand how each other’s networks operate or the network components that matter the most, he added.

Bloomfield noted that one of the lessons learned is that when NTCA members bury fiber, rather than put it on a utility pole, they tend to have fewer problems when disaster strikes.

Kevin Powell, Verizon's associate vice president of access engineering and operations for Florida, and other speakers agreed about the virtue of buried fiber. Verizon looks at how much of its fiber and the third-party fiber it uses is underground and how it can get fiber off utility poles, Powell said. “Having it buried makes a difference in the recovery and how much we see being damaged.”

Varnado also reported fewer problems with buried fiber. For next-generation 911, “we’re needing resilient, robust and redundant networks, and as long as [lines are] buried, we’re finding that they are much more robust and resilient.”

Reps. Nanette Barragan of California, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and 24 other House Democrats urged the FCC to include language access experts and “advocates for communities with limited English proficiency” (LEP) in Monday's roundtable. “Nearly 68 million United States residents speak a language other than English at home, and over 25 million are classified as LEP,” the Democrats said in a letter to Carr and acting Public Safety Bureau Chief Zenji Nakazawa, released Sunday night. “The FCC should prioritize making public safety communications -- including Wireless Emergency Alerts, Emergency Alert System messages broadcast over television and radio, and 9-1-1 accessibility standards -- multilingual, culturally competent, and accessible to all.”