Hurricane Recovery Task Force of FCC for Communications Recovery

Listen to this article

Days after the FCC engaged 77 million U.S dollars to fix communications on Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico; reelected Chairman of FCC Ajit Pai has announced the formation of the Hurricane Recovery Task Force. The new Task Force will be deployed to repair damage caused by the plenty of storms during the entire season. But, the Task Force will focus on fixing the communications networks on the Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands. The recent Hurricane Maria caused more damages and at least 90% of its cell towers were downed by this horrible Hurricane. The special counsel to Pai, Michael Carowitz will chair this new Task Force and it will have folks from across the agency. It will actually operate as an internal group focusing the recovery efforts of FCC.

Pai said in a statement that we are shifting from short-tem incident management to a long-term recovery phase. Our new formed team will adjust the structure of the FCC’s response. The FCC will be confronting various storm-related issues that fall within the jurisdiction of a number of bureaus and offices. It was essential that we should adopt a comprehensive and coordinated approach to support the reconstruction of communications infrastructure in order to restore the communications services. Now, the Hurricane Recovery Task Force will allow us to repair our communication infrastructure in most disastrous areas. Point to be noted that some private companies have stepped up to that challenge, such as Tesla is sending its Power-wall batteries and technicians, and Facebook is also sending its connectivity team to the U.S commonwealth.