California tells phone companies they need to improve service during disasters
Customers have been stranded due to lack of backup power
If there’s another PG&E blackout, many California residents will still find themselves unable to call their fire departments and other first responders to get emergency help.
That’s because despite repeated outages, the state’s phone companies have yet to install backup power to keep service up and running. And when service is lost, they don’t reveal where.
This week, state regulators wanted to know why.
“It’s endangering our lives,” said Marybel Batjer, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, at a San Francisco hearing on Wednesday. “Californians rely on their phones, the internet and both wireline and wireless technologies to receive emergency notifications to contact family and friends, and to reach first responders.
“We really must do better,” she said.
In the Santa Cruz Mountains, AT& T has not yet supplied a backup generator to help the 15,000 residents who depend on the Boulder Creek Fire Protection District for emergency help. Only after insistence by U. S. Rep. Anna Eshoo did Comcast deliver a small generator to power the rural district’s downtown internet station.
“All communication providers need to realize that they are a direct link to people’s essential needs,” said Boulder Creek Fire Chief Mark Bingham. “Without them, people are unable to get emergency care, law or fire.”
During the recent power shutoffs, hundreds of thousands of Californians were without wireless and internet services, according to the CPUC. Home phones powered by the internet
also did not work. Even some old-fashioned landlines were unreliable if traditional copper lines have been replaced by a fiberoptic network.
At least 874 of the state’s cell sites were out during October’s Kincade fire. In the Bay Area, outages ranged from 57.1 percent in Marin County to 2.1 percent in Santa Clara County.
“We had a large majority of our residents with no way to contact emergency services of any sort,” said Bingham. “People drove down and presented their medical issues to us at the station, rather than us coming to them.”
The Felton Fire Department confronted computer speeds that were so slow that they used radios for reports. But a larger concern, said Chief Robert Gray, was the isolation of residents.
“All of our notification and education systems revolve around the media working,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
There is no requirement that phone and internet companies provide backup battery or generator power — and network redundancy — in high-risk fire zones.
Additionally, they are not required to tell communities where service is down, so police and fire departments don’t know who needs help or whether emergency warnings are being heard.
The cell companies responded by saying the fluid situation regarding PG& E outages, with cell towers losing and gaining service, and the short notice of which communities would be affected, made it impractical to provide a list of downed services.
And it can be dangerous to bring generators to highfire risk cell tower sites, they said.
“We feel that we responded as well as we could in a unique situation,” said John Gauder, regional senior vice president for Comcast. “It has been a challenge to work through them and to to find the right level of communication based on the requests that have come in… Our first focus was on public safety and employee safety.”
“Considering the significant fire danger associated with Public Safety Power Shutoff events and with our focus being on public safety, we believe it to be in the best interest of our customers and communities to not deploy generators during this high risk fire time,” he said. “We are continuing to work with providers of battery backups to see what the other options are.”
Allison Ellison of Frontier Communications said “We worked hard to provide the reporting to the best of our ability based on the expedited requests. I can tell you that (the requests for information) come at a time — and they are resource intensive — when we are focusing our efforts on emergency preparedness, emergency response and maintenance of services.”
There are also confidentiality concerns, according to a Comcast attorney. Companies don’t want to disclose the locations of critical network infrastructure.
The companies agreed to voluntarily disclose data about downed sites. But they resisted recommendations to promptly provide backup power for key infrastructures, instead proposing technical workshops to reach agreement about future standards.
“A one size fits all standard does not take into account many of the feasibility issues and restrictions that we have, in terms of guaranteeing backup power to all sides,” said Rudy Reyes of Verizon. “We do recognize there is a need for state action here. And we would like to welcome workshops to work out exactly what that standard ought to be, and what exceptions and caveats should be made to that.”
More than a decade ago, the Federal Communications Commission ordered carriers to install eight hours of backup power at all cell sites and 24 hours of backup power at all central switching facilities.
But when the wireless industry challenged the order in court and won on procedural grounds, the FCC dropped the effort.