Can digital resilience make hurricanes less destructive?

We built a model city to find out.

Welcome to Blue River

Where nurses, truckers and video editors prepare for the first storm of hurricane season.

From howling winds to devastating ice storms, extreme weather events are growing more common, more unpredictable and more powerful due to climate change. Updating building codes and hardening infrastructure can help homes and businesses withstand storms. But some of the strongest tools we have for ensuring resilience today aren’t physical, but digital.

In the face of extreme weather, people’s safety is the top priority, and staying connected with the right technology can be of life-or-death importance, said Andrew Caldarello, AVP, Manufacturing, Automotive, Logistics at AT&T Business.

“Good communication technology is the lifeblood of any operation in an extreme weather event,”

Caldarello said. “From preparation to recovery, communication technology allows you to place people and assets out of harm’s way, understand a storm’s impact and ensure business continuity and a swift recovery.”

Having a diverse blend of communication technologies — including fiber internet, 5G, dedicated connectivity for first responders, satellite and IoT sensors — helps keep communities and residents stay safe and connected.

To see how digital preparation shapes climate resiliency, let’s travel to a fictional city along the sunny, humid and storm-prone coasts of the Southeast.

Preparing your business
for the unexpected

What causes business disruption?

Extreme weather, disasters, emergencies, pandemics, supply chain delays and other unanticipated events can all pose a threat to your business’s operations. Working alongside a trusted technology partner, you can evaluate threats and create long-term and short-term continuity plans to protect your business and employees.

How do I make a long-term continuity plan?

Identify your most critical business services. How would a catastrophic event impact them? Are your most important processes and data protected? In an emergency, how will you communicate with your employees? A diverse technology lineup— fiber internet, 5G, satellite and IoT — can help keep you connected throughout a disaster.

What goes into a short-term continuity plan?

If you know a disaster is on its way, create a plan for crisis management and communication. Make sure employees know their responsibilities and where they can get information. Protect hardware, software and records — back up data to off-site or Cloud locations so employees can access resources remotely.

Where can I learn more?

To learn more about how to protect your business, visit the AT&T Business Continuity Planning page. To see how AT&T brings networks back on line in the wake of disaster, see the AT&T Network Disaster Recovery page. And visit FirstNet.com for more information about America’s public safety network.

A transit worker checks a tablet in front of shipping containers

In Blue River, warm Southern nights have drawn residents for a century, and past storms are recalled with hushed reverence. Two decades ago, Hurricane Charley lashed the city, knocking out phone lines, flooding houses and leaving residents without power for weeks.

For the past few years, Blue River has been lucky. Other nearby cities received the brunt of major storms. But residents, local businesses and first responders know that the next one could be different, and they’ve built strong continuity plans to ensure they’re ready.

Now, as hurricane season gets underway, a seemingly innocuous system in the Gulf of Mexico has strengthened into something mean. Even with the storm’s track wobbling, it’s clear that Blue River might be in its path.

A woman makes a phone called with storm clouds and power lines

Preparing for the storm

“Having the phones with the weather emergency alerts, the WEAs on
cell phones, it’s just totally, completely revolutionary.”

- Al Sandrik, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

A lot has changed since Charley hit in 2004. Long before the new storm makes landfall, digital communication makes a difference.

“Data display systems have completely and totally changed the way we do our jobs,” said Al Sandrik, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service. “Having the phones with the weather emergency alerts, the WEAs on cell phones, it's just totally, completely revolutionary.”

In his 38-year career, Sandrik has watched wireless communication revolutionize storm safety. Rather than issuing mass alerts , dispatchers can now target individual cell towers with text alerts, providing residents with hyper-local and up-to-the-minute storm information.

“The days of severe weather sirens scattered along beaches are gone,” Caldarello said. “Today, we depend on handheld technology to be informed and updated with amazing accuracy.”

A woman makes a phone call with extreme weather sirens

At Blue River Memorial Hospital, nurses, doctors and administrators aren’t taking any chances. Staff run a test of the hospital’s backup power generators and double-check their digital connections to ambulance fleets to make sure they stay in contact during the storm.

Meanwhile, the hospital’s on-site IT teams check their LAN and WAN connections to make sure digital applications will keep running in the event of an outage.

“Resiliency and continuity planning during times of disaster or crisis is never more important than when lives are at stake,” said Erick Rucker, Regional Technical Director for Healthcare at AT&T Business. “If digital processes and applications are offline, emergency rooms and other critical care groups are unable to treat patients and would have to divert them to other hospitals, causing delay in care and even the potential for loss of life.”

Downtown, government and public safety officials are setting up the city’s Emergency Operations Center. First responders across police, fire, EMS, dispatch and emergency alert teams are in contact with state and federal agencies to plan for the incoming storm.

Even if the storm brings down cell towers, these teams will stay in communication on FirstNet®, Built with AT&T – the nation’s only public safety network built with and for first responders. The FirstNet Response Operations Group is ready to deploy a dedicated fleet of more than 150 portable cell sites to restore cell service and provide emergency responders with dedicated connectivity.

Further east, the managers at Gulf South Trucking double-check the IoT sensors that monitor the equipment and rigs in their warehouse, truck yard and across the region. These wireless connections will allow them to monitor their vehicles and trailers throughout the storm.

In coordination with the EOC, local and state governments have declared new evacuation routes and road closures along the coast, and Gulf South is keeping close contact with their drivers on the outskirts of Blue River. Their digital fleet management system actively reroutes trucks, ensuring that drivers and equipment are safe from high winds and that recovery supplies like food, water and medication can roll in quickly once the storm passes.

Near the inlet that gives Blue River its name, the crew at Cypress Media make sure that any flooding won’t reach their hardware. They check in with their employees as they migrate their most important digital assets to an offsite server.

The storm is hitting just as the video company’s most sensitive project nears completion. With enough rainfall, the river could flood and prevent employees from reaching the office.

But Cypress’s editors are no stranger to virtual work. During the pandemic, the company transformed its network with fiber internet, 5G and satellite and invested in cloud storage so its team of more than 100 employees could access bandwidth-intensive files and applications from anywhere. In fact, the company’s IT department just underwent a data recovery test a few weeks ago to make sure their projects could ride out a storm. Now, that drill might be put to the test.

Imagine you’re the Chief Information Officer at Cypress Media.
Answer the questions below to learn more about how to prepare for the storm.

Keep in mind that most questions have more than one right answer!

Where are the safest places to back up critical digital data as extreme weather rolls in?

Off-site storage locations

Cloud services systems

It’s important to protect software, data records and employee records by backing up these files to an off-site location. Cloud services can remove the burden of off-site data storage and ensure faster recovery from temporary or remote locations.

You want to test out your current business continuity plan. What elements go into it?

Determining threats to mission-critical operations

A data recovery test to see if data is stored safely

No business continuity plan is complete without a real test. A test involves setting clear objectives around recovery time to understand how long it will take to get up and running in the case of a real emergency. That means recovering data and stress-testing your most crucial operations.

Which employees should you inform about your disaster recovery plan?

All employees

All employees should know their responsibilities in your business continuity plan. In an emergency the “experts” may not be reachable, so having alternate employees who can execute the plan is crucial.

What external groups need to know about your disaster recovery plans?

Vendors, customers and other companies you work with closely

Local government agencies

Office building managers

Vendors should be educated on your plans for a disaster. Set up a hotline number for employees, families, customers and vendors to call to know about the emergency plan. Sharing your plans with local government agencies and with your building management can give everyone a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities in the event of business impact.

Weathering the storm

As the sky starts to glow with the storm’s approach, a fleet of linemen and utility trucks rolls into town. Outside of Blue River, AT&T Network Disaster Recovery vehicles are stationed to swoop in and create mobile cellular sites in case nearby towers and infrastructure are damaged during the storm.

The winds howl, and at daybreak, an alert hits mobile phones across the city: the storm has made landfall at 7:03 a.m.

Inside Blue River Memorial, anxiety dissipates as it becomes clear that digital applications are still online. Patient charts are updated with the latest information from the previous day, all backed up to an off-site and cloud network.

The EOC is fully staffed and on generator power. Emergency support function staff are on hand and monitoring the situation. Damage reports are added to near real-time mapping software and sent out to the field responders via FirstNet.

At the edge of town, Gulf South Trucking managers see on their IoT monitoring dashboards that their trucks and equipment are safe, but a bit of rain has snuck in under the warehouse roll gates.

Some of Cypress Media’s employees have evacuated further inland, but everyone is able to work safely remotely with access to the 4K video files they need to meet their deadline. Their work is humming, thanks to their cloud ecosystem.

Storm clouds disspite with a sunset on the horizon over a city

After the storm

By the evening, the wind and rain begin to calm and a bit of sun breaks through the storm’s edge. Downed lines already being resurrected by a convoy of utility trucks, and both the FirstNet and AT&T Network Disaster Recovery teams start trucking vehicles and equipment back home. For this storm, they weren’t necessary.

The next morning, the town of Blue River peels back the shutters, returns to work, and this storm, like so many before, becomes another memory. The town remains standing—its residents and first responders confidently connected.

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Communication technologies are unbelievable tools for disaster preparation and recovery, Caldarello said, but those tools are only powerful if the network architecture beneath them is agile, redundant and resilient.

“A more connected world means we know things sooner and with more accuracy, but with that capability comes a dependence on technology,”

Caldarello said. “The expectation that you should get all the latest information from just a single handheld device creates risk. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent, which means we’re all going to depend on this technology at some point, so it’s up to us to make it dependable.”

Learn more about business continuity services from AT&T Business.

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