Backup power for towers sought
When the nation’s largest electric utility preemptively shut off power last fall to prevent wildfires in California, customers lost more than just their lights — some lost their phones, too.
Data from the Federal Communications Commission shows 874 cellphone towers were offline during an Oct. 27 power shutoff that affected millions of people.
In Humboldt County, that included nearly one-quarter of the cell towers, or 44 of the 188 that operate in the county. During the Oct. 27 outage, that meant dropped calls, text messages that never sent and load bars that never fully completed loading. It also meant people could not call 911.
Humboldt County was one of the top five most impacted counties during the planned power outage, but fell far behind Marin County, which saw 160 down cell towers during the outage, or more than half of those in the county.
On Wednesday, some Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation that would require telecommunication companies to have at least 72 hours of back-up power for all cellphone towers in high-risk fire areas. Telecom companies would have to pay for it.
North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) said he wrote the bill after meeting with telecom company officials last summer, where he said they assured him they had plans to prevent widespread outages during a power shutoff.
“As we all know, this wasn’t true. They were wrong. And, candidly, lives were put at risk,” McGuire said, latter adding. “This bill is not about checking your Facebook status. It’s about life and death.”
The federal government has tried to mandate backup power for cellphone towers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the industry successfully fought it.
“It is unfair and unreasonable for the Legislature and the (state regulators) to allow the electric utilities to de-energize their networks and expect that the communications network is going to become a wholesale replacement for power,” said Carolyn McIntyre, president of the California Cable and Telecommunications Association.
“Do I believe we are in for a fight? Hell, yes,” McGuire said, adding: “This is no longer a discussion about cost.”
McGuire announced his bill on the same day representatives from AT&T and Verizon were scheduled to testify before state lawmakers about the outages and ways to prevent them. It’s the second time lawmakers will have hauled in private companies to account for the effects surrounding the widespread blackouts in the fall, the largest planned power outages in state history.
In November, lawmakers questioned executives from the state’s largest investorowned utilities, including the leadership of troubled Pacific Gas & Electric, whose equipment has been blamed for sparking the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise and destroyed roughly 19,000 buildings. The company filed for bankruptcy last year.
Telecommunications outages have worsened as wildfires have become more common and more destructive. A report from the California Public Utilities Commission found 85,000 wireless customers and 160,000 wired customers lost service during the 2017 North Bay Fires.
Most recently, the FCC says up to 27% of Sonoma County’s wireless cell sites were offline during a fire in October.
In advance comments to the legislative committee, California’s four largest wireless companies — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — say they generally make sure their major telecommunication hubs have at least between 48 hours and 72 hours of onsite backup power. They use mobile generators at other sites, but said the generators don’t work at every cell tower.