Proposed federal legislation may help residents across the state who lost cell phone service and experienced power blackouts as a result of superstorm Sandy during the next emergency situation.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-6) has introduced the Securing Access to Networks in Disasters Act (H.R. 3998) that would improve communications and prevent widespread cell phone service outages during disasters.
“It’s about basically trying to improve communication because during Sandy a lot of cell phone towers went down, it was difficult to communicate in general,” he said. “So we are trying to get at that problem.”
Pallone said, if approved by Congress, the major portion of the legislation would ensure that consumer cell phones would work on other carriers’ networks when a carrier goes down.
The act would also give priority to 911 services and emergency alerts, increase coordination between wireless carriers, utilities and public safety officials, and provide 911 services over Wi-Fi hotspots during emergencies.
According to Pallone, during superstorm Sandy one in four cell phone towers in New Jersey were not functional, and in the hardest hit areas of the state almost half of the towers were not functional.
Pallone said the initiative would be a multi-faceted approach to improving communications during emergency situations.
“The whole idea is to have communications systems to be inter-operable during a storm or any kind of emergency,” he said. “The idea is that systems would kick in during an emergency that would be inter-operable because we had major problems during Sandy.”
The bill, according to Pallone, would also launch an expansive study of the future of network resiliency.
“We had a lot of discussions, even in the first days after Sandy, to make power lines more resilient, communications more resilient, so that they don’t go out basically,” Pallone said.
“Some of the power problems that we had during Sandy had actually occurred during previous storms, so the idea is to make the communications infrastructure more resilient so it doesn’t go out during a storm.” Another component of the bill would ensure that communications providers, including radio, TV and telephone, could repair outages more quickly.
“There were problems across state lines as well, so it is again about making the system inoperable even across state lines,” he said. “A lot of times those systems can’t communicate across state lines.”
Pallone said the bill was introduced during the third anniversary of superstorm Sandy and is currently in the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which Pallone is the ranking member.
Pallone said many of the ideas contained in the bill came from a September roundtable discussion in Monmouth Beach focusing on telecommunications, broadcast, social media and first-responder communications featuring officials with local broadcast, telecommunications and utility companies.