Frustrated Helene survivors struggle to get cell service in destructive aftermath

BURNSVILLE, North Carolina ‒ The ongoing loss of cell phone service in Hurricane Helene-impacted areas raises questions for survivors about safety, missed emergency warnings and the inability to reassure far-flung friends and family.

Helene knocked out power to wide swaths of the South with both high winds and flooding. The destruction also destroyed cell phone towers, severing communication for potentially millions of people. The lack of service is obvious across the region, as frustrated residents cluster near the few sites offering Wi-Fi or spotty cell service.

In the storm's aftermath, the town of Red Hill's 355 residents couldn’t call to check on loved ones. They couldn’t get news about road closures, who had gasoline or generators, and who needed help.

"No one knew if we were dead or alive," said Kacie Smith, 28, who runs the Red Hill general store.

Cell phone companies have a wide variety of emergency replacement systems they can deploy, from truck-mounted antennas to ones carried aloft by drones or ridden in via electric mountain bike.

But in all those cases, they require physical access to disaster areas, which is still being restored.

"There's a feeling of real disconnect, no pun intended, when cell phone service goes out," said Jonathan Sury, a senior staff associate at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Climate School.

"There's an extreme dependency that's developed that we didn't have 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. Everyone is spending a lot of money on utilities ‒ power, gas, cell phones, Internet ‒ so there's an expectation if we're paying all this money, it will be back up and running quickly," he said.

One major challenge: disasters are happening more frequently, and when they do, they cost more on average to recover from. That means higher costs for governments and corporations like cell phone providers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Experts have warned for years that American infrastructure, from cell phone towers to electric service, highway bridges and drinking water systems, is vulnerable to disasters.

According to federal officials, the United States since 1980 has suffered nearly 400 weather and climate disasters costing more than $1 billion each, totaling more than $2.8 trillion in damages. That doesn't include Helene or July's Hurricane Beryl, which some experts say caused an estimated $30 billion in damages, cleanup costs, lost wages and lost tourism dollars as it swept across Texas and then up to New England.

"The downside is we're having more storms," said Shannon Weiner, the Monroe County, Florida, director of emergency management. "The upside is that we're getting better at responding to them because of the partnerships."

Weiner, whose county includes the hurricane-prone Florida Keys, has worked in emergency management for 20 years. She said Monroe County began including cell phone companies as part of annual regional planning exercises following 2017's Hurricane Irma, which knocked out phone service, severed electrical lines and destroyed roads.

"I think people's expectations have changed," Weiner said. "They do expect us to respond quicker, to respond faster."

Americans expect help will arrive rapidly

For many older Americans, the idea of being constantly connected may still feel like an unnecessary luxury. But experts say younger generations ‒ and many older folks themselves ‒ depend on reliable cell phone service and always-on Internet access to live their lives. Many people work remotely, or need access for medical care or to run small businesses.

That connectivity has shifted Americans' expectations of how quickly services like electricity and Internet access should get restored following a disaster. Sury said a 2015 survey found that 51% of Americans expect someone to help them within an hour of a major disaster happening, up from 32% about 20 years ago.

Following Beryl, some areas of Texas took more than a month to see power restored, and at least seven people were reported dead from heat.

Helene, which hit Florida on Thursday night before moving inland, severed power from Florida's Big Bend up through Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and into Virginia. More than 200 people were killed as a result of the storm, and that number could climb as searches continue.

Hampering the efforts to tally the deaths: A lack of cell service is making it hard for people who survived to check in with authorities. At one point, authorities said around 1,000 people were missing, but that was because many of them were simply out of communication.

Recognizing the loss of connectivity, federal officials sent 40 Starlink internet terminals to the area to assist. Small enough to fit in a backpack and easily powered by a generator or SUV's power outlet, the terminals provide high-speed Wi-Fi service via a constellation of privately owned satellites.

T.H.O.R. and other equipment ready to assist

Among the solutions that providers like Verizon are deploying into the Helene disaster area are trucks like T.H.O.R., a behemoth mobile cell system officially called the Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response vehicle.

Built on a Ford truck chassis, the T.H.O.R. system has two satellite antennas, two collapsible cell phone towers, waist-high tires and a hard-to-miss Verizon red paint job. It even has a drone that operators can fly into the sky to send cell signals further. Workers have also mounted a Starlink satellite terminal on a battery-assisted mountain bike to access areas where vehicles can't go.

To keep it safe between missions, Verizon houses T.H.O.R. in an old limestone mine buried beneath rolling hills near the Missouri River in Independence, Missouri, about 300 miles from the geographic center of the Lower 48. When disaster strikes, T.H.O.R. and other trucks roll out from the mine, connect to the nearby interstates, and restore service almost immediately upon arrival.

T.H.O.R. wasn't deployed to Helene in part because the roads are so damaged, and Verizon instead sent in 70 other pieces of equipment, including tethered drones that act as extra-tall temporary cell phone towers. Verizon has a small army of workers restoring service, including more than 1,000 contractors helping clear roads, the company said.

"Every day we're making a lot of progress," said Jhonathan Montenegro, Verizon's associate director of engineering for Florida, who is helping with regional Helene recovery. "We just ask that everybody be patient and understand … They might not be able to do live video streaming but they'll be at least be able to make a phone call, send those messages to their loved ones to let them know they're OK."

Alongside T.H.O.R., Verizon has several similar trucks, a smaller camper-based system, a robotic dog and drones socked away in the underground warehouse, which Tony LaRose, Verizon's associate director of network assurance, likes to call the "Bat Cave."

From Independence, Verizon can send T.H.O.R. and other recovery vehicles east or west along Interstate 70 to cover Tornado Alley, or south down Interstate 49 toward Texas and the Gulf Coast to assist following a hurricane. The company has other equipment depots around the country.

Larose got the idea for storing equipment underground after the 2011 Joplin, Missouri, tornado, that killed more than 150 people and caused $2.8 billion in damage, including tossing a semi-trailer more than 300 feet and throwing a school bus into a garage.

"I kept imagining that tornado coming through my area and taking out all of our equipment," he said. "We've got people's lives on the line. People have to use their phones to get help, keep their families updated on how they're doing."

What being prepared really looks like

Other mobile phone companies have similar equipment. AT&T, for instance, built a custom 45-foot-long landing craft after it had to use a barge following 2022's Hurricane Ian to float cell-phone equipment out to serve Sanibel Island off Florida's coast.

And retailers like Home Depot stockpile plywood, generators and other recovery materials around the country. Home Depot earlier this summer also announced new partnerships to better assist Americans living in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands during this year's hurricane season.

Most cell phone towers are equipped with emergency generators that can run independently for several days, and electric utilities across the country have been working to "harden" power lines against disasters.

Florida Light & Power, for instance, says it has put 76% of its main lines serving critical communities and services underground or otherwise toughened them against storms, and replaced nearly all of its major transmission support poles with steel or concrete structures.

Still, days after Helene passed, thousands of residents of Florida's Big Bend area remained without electricity.

Sury said many utilities are lagging in their preparations, because that might require charging customers more money or cut into profits. He said local governments and some states are also unwilling to adequately fund preparations in an era of cascading disasters. Helene, for instance, knocked out power but also wiped out drinking-water systems in parts of North Carolina

"We've not made many of the upgrades we know we need to make in this country," Sury said. "There is a fundamental lack of readiness that is present and doesn't show any real signs of changing. Being prepared costs money."