Hurricane Sandy not only caused destruction of homes, but the power outages caused communication trouble for millions. AT&T Mid-Atlantic States President Michael Schweder told NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider that his company is working to improve service during storms and it is helping with Sandy recovery efforts.
Cell phone service for AT&T customers was disrupted after Hurricane Sandy because of power problems. “It was about 2.7 million customers that lost power and therefore we lost power going into a number of our cell towers. We were probably out as a network for about four or five days,” Schweder said. “It impacted our buildings in New Jersey. We have enormous backup for the global network operation center, which is in Bedminster that runs the nationwide and worldwide network, so that was up and running. We were able to restore most power to those buildings within four days, most of our customers within a week.”
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Schweder said AT&T is working on improvements to its system, as it has been doing since a similar issue last year. While some competitors have said AT&T could be more aggressive about having batter backups on towers, Schweder said his company was as up to date as others before Hurricane Sandy and had taken steps to prepare.
“As a private entity, we’re the first private company that’s ever been certified for disaster preparedness by the Homeland Security Department,” Schweder said. “What we’ve done is, we now have 10 cell sites staging areas to bring power in. We brought thousands of generators in ahead of time.”
After the storm hit, crews worked to restore service to customers. Schweder said AT&T worked with officials to ensure crews could get to damaged areas to make repairs. “Ocean County and Monmouth County in particular, the local officials were very helpful,” he said. “They allowed us to take teams in there. We staked them out. They were there for days. But we were able to keep that up and going.”
Because communication becomes vital after an emergency, Schweder said officials need to discuss ways to make the systems more reliable. “I know that the FCC is looking at this, but we’re going to need to look at the options in terms of our electric grid and seeing that that’s up and running,” he said. “But again, this is something I don’t think we could have ever prepared for, for the magnitude of this.”
Schweder said AT&T has become very involved in the rebuilding process after Hurricane Sandy. After getting a call from New Jersey First Lady Mary Pat Christie, AT&T donated $1 million to the Hurricane Sandy New Jersey Relief Fund she helped set up. The company also donated to a fund New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo created. “We probably did about another $1 million on top of that with Red Cross nationally, with the food banks in South Jersey and our employees contributed as individuals almost another $350,000,” Schweder said.
AT&T also held a day of caring where almost 1,000 employees from as far away as Massachusetts came and worked at food banks and demolition sites where homes had to come down.
“I think the thing that’s truly remarkable is we had thousands of our own employees here that were impacted by this and without power and were willing to go out and work on behalf of their neighbors and see that things were restored for them as well,” said Schweder.