How carriers batten down the hatches for hurricanes

Needless to say, hurricane season can be a stressful time for telecom carriers.

How stressful, you ask? Well, picture what would happen if the multitude of hardhat-wearing network technicians you see in a typical Verizon commercial got swept up in a "Wizard of Oz"-style twister. In other words, think about how spread out telecom carrier infrastructure is and about how many different bases telcos have to cover to protect it all during natural disasters.

"The biggest challenge in preparing for a storm is that we have so many external assets," says Steve Butera, Verizon's director of business continuity planning and emergency management. "If you look at Verizon telecom, we have central offices, we have garage work centers, we have vehicles, we have generators, utility poles, aerial cables and remote terminals. That's a lot of physical infrastructure that's exposed in a wide range of areas."

The key to managing this vast sprawl of equipment and infrastructure, says Butera, is to break it down by region. In Verizon's case, each area has a regional command center that is responsible for safeguarding all of its own equipment. Seventy-two hours before a storm hits, each command center in the affected area has to issue a report on how prepared it is for the storm.

Basically, Butera says, this amounts to a checklist of tasks that each command center must accomplish in order for its region to be considered secure. In the case of the recent Hurricane Gustav, this meant testing out emergency generators, ensuring that vehicle fuel tanks were topped off, and moving loose outdoor equipment to secure locations.

"It's a batten-down-the-hatches ordeal," says Butera. "From a real estate perspective, we have to make sure that all our buildings have been identified, we have to make sure that their roof drains are cleared and that areas that require sandbagging are sandbagged. It's very much along the lines of what you'd often see on the news for what people are doing to prepare their own homes."

Thomas Pica, the executive director of corporate communications for Verizon Wireless, says that the preparation for the wireless network paid off this week, as 90% of Verizon’s network was up and running the day after the storm hit. Indeed, Pica says that the company's backup capacity was so strong that he could make successful calls to areas without electricity.
"I held an uninterrupted wireless conversation Wednesday night with one of our folks who was traveling in a car to one of the hardest-hit areas south of New Orleans," he says. "He said there was no power and that traffic lights weren't working."

Of course, Verizon isn't the only carrier that has had success in rapidly restoring its network services. AT&T dispatched nearly 2,000 employees this week to assess damage caused by the storm and to help restore any service to affected customers. The company said earlier this week that most of its services hadn't been impacted by the storm and that the only big service outages had occurred in "hard-hit areas" of Louisiana. Like Verizon, AT&T spent the week prior to the hurricane topping off fuel at generators, testing backup batteries, and putting emergency response equipment in place.