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Each year natural disasters cause storm surges and flood waters, excessive winds, uprooted cables, and damaged equipment – compromising the safety and stability of communication networks and leaving operators to scramble and restore service to emergency crews and subscribers. In fact, disasters place extraordinary demands on communication networks including:
- The need for extra personnel, straining network capacity to handle the increased call traffic
- Immediate solutions for outages and infrastructure damage
- The need to evacuate operations
- The overloading of public carrier networks
Given the importance of communications and the challenges that natural disasters impose, it’s not unexpected that public safety professionals are concerned about their ability to provide good communications support in the event of a natural disaster. According to Jeff Garnett, Department of Emergency Management in Miami, Florida, “The biggest focus here in Miami is how to recover after a hurricane. From our last hurricane, our cellular went down, our radios and repeaters went down. I’m always thinking of backups to the backups. You have to have the mindset that everything is going to fail and you must make sure you have a method of communications that doesn’t rely on existing infrastructure to be here.”
How to Prepare Your Network for Natural Disasters
Following the tips below will help you prevent losses to your network infrastructure and be ready to react when losses do occur.
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A comprehensive disaster plan must be created and easily accessible for guidance during natural disasters. Test procedures through training exercises and simulations to prove that all parties know exactly what to do and when.
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Install only disaster-ready equipment that works during normal operations and also has the flexibility, capacity, and reliability to continue doing the job during an emergency.
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Create a cache of standby systems and spare equipment that are activated only when needed.
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Spare equipment must be readily available and easy to transport to the site for immediate installation. |
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Spare equipment must be quick to deploy with the option of delivering same day or overnight. |
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Your emergency resources should include standby equipment that can be swiftly applied wherever and whenever needed. |
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Retain a reputable, reliable services vendor with the equipment and personnel required to offer field support for de-installation of damaged equipment and installation of new equipment as needed. |
Due to the acute devastation of individual natural disasters last year, 2008 now has been pushed to the No. 3 rank of the most expensive disaster year on record. By preparing your network for mission critical events, you help to avert continuing losses to network infrastructure and prevent costly network downtime.
We provide network equipment and Spare Parts Management services for Tier 1 nationwide carriers, Fortune 500 companies, service providers, and government entities. For more information on American Communications’ program offerings, please contact a sales representative at 1.866.593.5931 or at info@go-ac.com.
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