La. 911 and Broadcaster Woes Linger After Ida

Local 911 officials and broadcasters blamed AT&T for communication problems during Hurricane Ida. Telecom network issues caused public safety answering point (PSAP) outages and kept stations from communicating with staff and viewers as they face power issues, they said.

The emergency number system at Louisiana’s Assumption Parish went down Saturday, including 911 trunks and administrative lines, said the locality’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (OHSEP) Director John Boudreaux. Electricity went out, but a backup generator kept the site operating until power was restored Wednesday, he said. The PSAP got one administrative line running Tuesday and started rerouting 911 calls there, he said. “All problems are on the AT&T network,” said Boudreaux. “Our local equipment never failed.” The official said he wasn’t sure when AT&T would restore services: “Local technician could not give me a timeline.”

The St. Bernard Parish Fire Department’s 911 center is up and running again after an outage, Fire Chief Thomas Stone emailed Thursday. The system went down Monday at about 1 a.m.; it was partially restored at 1:45 p.m. and fully operational at about 6 p.m. Monday, he said. “It was due to an outage from AT&T, and it affected the entire region. The calls were not rerouted because there was no phone service. We set up cell phones and put the numbers to call on social media.” The department’s email server was down Sunday night-Wednesday night.

In St. Mary Parish, “911 lines calling in are switched to a cell phone in the dispatch office” and “the main trunking line has to be repaired,” the locality’s OHSEP Emergency Operations Coordinator Jimmy Broussard emailed Thursday. “But the process is working and calls are getting through with the patch.” The hurricane knocked out New Orleans 911 for 12 hours Monday.

For more on Ida-triggered outages, see our reports here and here.

Broadcasters

AT&T’s network going down was an added complication for broadcasters dealing with damaged facilities and power outages, they told us.

“That’s something you don’t expect,” said Audacy New Orleans Market Manager Kevin Cassidy. “We’ve all come to rely on cellular communications, how are we going to communicate with our team?” Phone lines are nearly as important as a tower to a news station in a disaster, he said. WWL(AM) New Orleans was receiving calls on government updates as well as anecdotal reports from viewers about flooding and residents trapped on their roofs needing rescue, he said. The station used workarounds including personal email, he said.

Louisiana Association of Broadcasters President Polly Prince Johnson said communications being down has made it hard for her to learn how broadcasters in the state are faring. “We don’t have the information we need,” she said.

An AT&T spokesperson declined to respond to complaints, referring to a Wednesday blog post saying the wireless network was at 94% of normal. “Customers in affected areas may still be experiencing wireline service interruptions due to storm damage and commercial power outages in their area.” AT&T is focusing on restoring service to the hardest hit areas, such as Lafourche, Tangipahoa and Terrebonne parishes, the post said. “We now have a total of 23 on-air mobile cell site solutions.”

Resiliency

The FCC hasn’t commented on calls for an investigation of network resiliency in Louisiana, but acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel repeatedly called for field hearings after damaging storms during the previous FCC (see 1909260032). On Thursday, she tweeted about the vulnerability of infrastructure from both her personal and official Twitter accounts: “Floods and fires in so many places,” Rosenworcel tweeted. “Supporting resilient infrastructure has never been more important.”

Wednesday’s FCC disaster information reporting system update showed the Assumption Parish PSAP down, St. Mary and another parish rerouting calls to other lines, and a fourth parish operational without location information. That's an improvement from the prior report (see 2108310050). Data released at around 5 p.m. EDT Thursday showed few major changes from the previous day.

Some 12.7% of cellsites were offline in the affected area, compared with 17.1% in the previous report. The vast majority of downed cellsites are in Louisiana, with 28.5% in the state's affected counties out of service. Less than 2% of cellsites in affected counties in Alabama and Mississippi were down. “Wireless providers frequently use temporary facilities such as cells-on-wheels (also known as COWs), increased power at operating sites, roaming agreements, or take other actions,” the report said.

More cable and wireline subscribers were listed as out of service in Louisiana, 449,407 vs. 468,674. They declined in Alabama from 2,427 to 1,125 and Mississippi from 19,224 to 10,909. Four TV stations and eight FMs remained off-air, plus an additional AM.

Ida DIRS reports contain graphs and more information than those during previous storms. That’s an effort by the chairwoman’s office to improve emergency data collection and sharing, an FCC spokesperson emailed Thursday. “The FCC has updated its DIRS reporting to give the public more transparency into service restoration efforts,” the representative said. “Better information sharing and awareness in times of emergency will help disaster relief efforts, especially in the early stages of communications disruption.”

Stations ‘Stretched’

The storm destroyed a 2,000-foot tower Cumulus shares with another broadcaster, reducing it to 150 feet, emailed Senior Vice President Technology and Operations Conrad Trautmann. “Thankfully, nobody was injured and we continue to assess the full extent of the damage. Our backup facility for that station [WZRH(FM) LaPlace, Louisiana] remains without power so we are working for another solution to get that station back on air as soon as possible.” Electricity being off affected all of Cumulus’ New Orleans stations, Trautmann said.

Power outages and a run on diesel fuel for generators affected many of the stations that are down, broadcasters told us. “We are currently lacking power to broadcast from our station,” tweeted WGSO(AM) New Orleans. WWL partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and so has priority access to fuel, but other stations have found it difficult to acquire, said Cassidy. “Everybody is on generators from the tip of Louisiana to the Mississippi state line.” And a "lot of people need fuel -- we’re stretched,” she said: Even stations with generators are likely running at reduced power, reducing their coverage.

Audacy has been running the feed from its news station WWL on all of its outlets in the area, regardless of format, Cassidy said. This makes the information more accessible and allows the stations to reduce staff needed during the emergency. Staffers not needed for news reporting and keeping the WWL broadcast up are working remotely from outside the storm-affected area, while the essential staffers are living out of the station, said Cassidy, who expects the broadcaster to operate this way at least into next week.

With no water and power, and with flooding and mid-90 degree temperatures, New Orleans is close to “uninhabitable,” Cassidy said. The skeleton crew approach is also a response to COVID-19, he said. “God forbid someone got sick in the building and we had to quarantine or send people to the hospital right now.”