Verizon in Hot Seat as FCC’s Sandy Field Hearings Get Under Way

The FCC heard from carriers and the electricity industry, as well as key local officials, in the field hearing at the historic Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House in Manhattan. All of the FCC commissioners, except for Robert McDowell, who was testifying before the House (see story in this issue), made the trip north from Washington. The FCC will collect more testimony Wednesday during a network resilience workshop at Brooklyn Law School (http://xrl.us/boezhz).

Schnirman, from the hard hit Long Beach Barrier Island community, was most critical of carriers. “All mobile communications were lost,” he said. “Our communications redundancies failed. The city possesses redundant services as a contingency and if we lose one we hope to have the alternate option available but those all failed. Now over three months later Verizon has still not been fully reinstated. We're awaiting final restoration of City Hall’s fax lines.” The city lost all ability to handle 911 calls locally, Schnirman said. Our “911 calls were routed then to Nassau County and routed through the Nassau mobile command bus back to Long Beach.”

Everything didn’t fail, Schnirman said. “The government side worked,” he said. “But unfortunately we faced some obstacles to restoring our communications. The lack of communication and response from service providers was extremely disconcerting. All cell towers in the city were down during the storm and service providers were nowhere to be found. We spent over a week trying to obtain mobile cell towers.” Schnirman said the city spent many hours reaching out to the wireless carriers and were passed from office to office. He said the city called the customer support line of one unnamed carrier and asked whether it would install a cell on wheels (COW) temporary tower. “The customer service rep replied, ‘You might want to look that up on the Internet. I don’t know what that is.’ Well, obviously, ironically, we had no Internet at that time.”

Rahul Merchant, commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, called for better power backup for wireless facilities, in light of the widespread wireless outages following the storm. “In this day and age of better technologies we should be able to provide a longer battery life to our cell towers and other cell infrastructure,” Merchant said. “The main goal ought to be during the time of emergencies and after that our residents, citizens, and all of our customers, should have available to them some way of communicating with the governments, emergency officials and their loved ones.” Merchant told the FCC commissioners city facilities held up for the most part, but damage to commercial networks was widespread. “We saw a flooding of central offices located in the same flood plains in lower Manhattan,” he said. “We saw call surges on the public telecommunications network. We also saw quite a bit of fuel shortages to power some of the cell towers, antennas and other areas."

Jim Gerace, a vice president for Verizon’s New York region, played defense at the field hearing. Verizon faced an unprecedented threat from the flooding in lower Manhattan, Gerace said. “While the switches were out of harm’s way on upper floors, the real damage was done to the outside plant, the cables that go from those switches to our customers ... and to the customers’ equipment in their subbasements,” he said. “I've never seen anything like that before.” Verizon is now about 90 percent restored in lower Manhattan, he said. There was a “silver lining” to Sandy, Gerace said. “This area has gone through a technological transformation that would under ordinary conditions take years to complete and it’s only been 100 days,” Gerace said. “We've laid about 6,500 miles of fiber and removed about 150 tons of old copper cable.” As a result all of lower Manhattan is “100 percent fiber optic” which “bodes very well for withstanding storms like this in the future,” he said.

Outside of Manhattan, telephone service has been restored to almost all areas where customers have returned to their homes, Gerace said. “There’s still substantial amounts of the Jersey shore and parts of Long Island and Staten Island where people have not yet rebuilt so there are not facilities there but as they return we will be ready,” he said.

Each of the commissioners had an opportunity to ask questions of panelists. Genachowski noted he had toured Verizon facilities in lower Manhattan after the storm. “The devastation really was just incredible, hard to believe, three or four floors of equipment completely covered with water for a couple of days and when you see it it’s hard to believe you were able to provide any service at all.”

But Genachowski pressed Gerace to respond in particular to criticisms by Schnirman and Merchant about the failure of Verizon to communicate with its customers after Sandy struck. Gerace took aim at complaints by Schnirman. “As far as the communication issue, between the town and Verizon I really don’t understand what happened there because we did have an account executive on who was talking to the town, maybe that didn’t filter up to Mr. Schnirman,” he said. “I will tell you we had two COW equivalents in their town within five days and the only reason it took five days was access to that area, getting passable streets, that sort of thing.” Gerace said Verizon was well aware of problems in Long Beach before the first call came in from the city. “We know what cell sites are out, that they need something to augment the signal out there,” he said. That help “couldn’t get there quicker I don’t think is anyone’s fault.”

In other testimony at the Manhattan field hearing, Michael Corso of the New York State Department of Public Service, emphasized the interdependency of the power grid and the communications network. “Interdependencies abound so it’s critical that we work in an integrated and coordinated fashion,” he said. “First responders need communications. Communications needs power.” Corso said wireless voice services and text messages are critical after a disaster. “While we've witnessed the ability of providers to react well to emergencies and power outages to restore network elements within their control, more is needed to improve the resiliency of critical wireless infrastructure and the underlying power and backhaul systems necessary to maintain service during emergencies,” he said. “Information flow” is also critical, he said. “It has to be uniform. It has to be efficient and sufficiently granular to be actionable in the real world of restoration."

Upendra Chivukula, deputy speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, counseled the FCC against imposing “arbitrary” backup power requirements on wireless carriers. “Carriers may be forced to deactivate certain sites,” he said. He highlighted the unusual series of problems carriers faced as a result of Sandy. “It was an extraordinary event and adding to the complex problems, wireless carriers were unable to rely on the critical infrastructure including the tunnels and the subway, the steam heat, access to fuel and the electric grid,” said Chivukula, a Democrat. “Significant interruptions in petroleum distribution and dispensing were not forecasted and carriers have to adjust to events.” Carriers already invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year to improve their existing cell sites, not due to regulation but as part of doing business, Chivukula said. “The fiercely competitive nature of the industry drives each provider to do all they can to satisfy the customers who have many choices available to them and the ability to provide reliable service during an emergency is no exception.”

Clifford Abbio, vice president-engineering and operations at tower company Crown Castle, said about 1,100 of the company’s towers faced winds of higher than 40 mph during the storm. “Our ground teams were severely hampered by road closures, by availability of fuel, availability of lodging,” Abbio said. Crews complained about the difficulty of bringing in fuel and even reaching tower sites, he said. “It took us about a week to get to those 1,100 sites.” Abbio said about half the towers had generators on site for backup power. Abbio also complained about the federal regulations the company faces as it works to install generators elsewhere. Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Occupation Safety & Health Administration rules, as well as noise level and hazardous materials storage regulations all pose a challenge, he said.

Ten million lost power in 20 states as a result of Sandy, twice the number associated with Hurricane Katrina, said Edward Comer, general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute, which represents electric utilities. “I think it’s fair to say that the interdependencies are obvious,” he said. “We rely upon telecom systems to operate our systems, to manage our restoration and coordination and to communicate with our customers in real time in emergencies. ... Resiliency is an issue for us as well. It’s a complicated subject. At a minimum it means be prepared, have multiple backups.” Electric utilities already are “subject to extraordinary reliability requirements and they're requirements that we want to meet,” Comer said. Sandy “was a particularly bad storm,’ he said. “Everybody has to assume that bad things happen and you have to prepare for that."

The FCC commissioners all offered introductory remarks, but none discussed specific regulations the FCC might impose in reaction to Sandy. “The inability to communicate with family and emergency personnel during a disaster is simply unacceptable,” Genachowski said. “We must meet this moment with smart action from all sectors to ensure that communications networks are working when people need them most. Much has been done. Much more needs to be done.” Genachowski said late in the morning the testimony made clear how big of an issue power supply and “the interdependence of the communications grid and the electric grid” was during Sandy.

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn described how she rode out Hurricane Hugo in Moncks Corner, S.C., in 1999, “balled-up in a dark corner near other family members who escaped from Charleston, listening to the first trees I ever loved being broken like toothpicks.” Most at the FCC have experienced similar disasters first hand, she said. “As communications regulators, we must do all within our power to prepare our wired and wireless communications networks, 911 systems, and other infrastructure for future unexpected events,” Clyburn said.

The Sandy field hearings are critical to the FCC’s understanding of what went wrong and what went right during and after Sandy, said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “You will help us understand what happened and how public safety, infrastructure providers, and government can come together to make our communications systems strong,” she said. “We need an honest accounting of the resiliency of our nation’s digital age infrastructure."

"There is much for us to learn,” said Commissioner Ajit Pai. “Our first job is to figure out what happened during and after Superstorm Sandy. How did people communicate with each other? Did they use wireline networks or wireless phones? How did they receive information about the storm? Were callers able to reach emergency services, and if not, why not? Were emergency personnel able to communicate with each other? Which communications networks worked? Which did not, and why? Did copper lines weather the storm best? Did coaxial cable? Did fiber? Did wires attached to poles perform better or worse than those buried in conduits? After the storm, how did repair efforts proceed? How quickly were networks restored?"

AT&T did all it could ahead of time to plan for Superstorm Sandy, said Bill Smith, AT&T president-network operations, in a Tuesday blog post. AT&T did not testify at the hearing. “By all accounts, Superstorm Sandy was a massively destructive event that resulted in more than $70 billion in damage and caused devastating losses for many in the impacted area,” Smith wrote (http://xrl.us/boezty). “More than eight million people lost power, which was a record for a storm-induced power outage. AT&T has a $600 million, 300-vehicle network disaster recovery organization that has a 30-year history of preparing for the full spectrum of ‘all threats’ and that conducts full-scale field exercises across the country and overseas several times each year. We utilized these critical resources to prepare and respond to Sandy in the most effective way possible.”