Yesterday’s AT&T cellular service outage throughout Hawaii makes you wonder how many of our civil defense and other first responders plan to use their cell phone during our next hurricane, flood or power outage to get the word out.
The outage lasted longer than reported in the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin accounts. Our service wasn’t restored fully until close to 5 p.m., making it a 10-hour outage.
Maybe we should just forget about relying on cell phone technology in our next crisis. Yesterday’s prolonged outage creates more doubts about the technology's reliability.
CHORE was launched in 2006 after an inadequate response to an earthquake emergency in Hawaii. That event revealed an opening for average citizens to contribute experience-based suggestions to improve crisis communications. The many deaths recorded after California's wildfires in 2017-18, the wildfire destruction of Lahaina, Maui in 2023, and the tragic Texas floods in 2025 also revealed gaps in officials' ability to communicate effectively. Visitors are invited to comment.
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>>> Maybe we should just forget about relying on cell phone technology in our next crisis. <<<
ReplyDeleteThere is no technology so great that it can't be screwed it up with poor planning or execution.
Besides, I don't think they went with AT&T. They went with a vendor that allows roaming to another local vendor.
And let's not forget 800MHz system. That's not "cell technology".