When hurricanes pummeled the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf Coast late last summer, the response required a significant emergency effort from the U.S. military. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether supporting medical response, helping provide communications or coordinating partnerships across groups, the Army \u2013 as well as the Coast Guard \u2013 played a critical role. In particular, the Army was heavily involved in response and recovery efforts that followed Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and nearby islands in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Hurricane Maria bore down on Puerto Rico and nearby Virgin Islands, the Army\u2019s Defense-Wide Transmissions Systems office received notification that the National Guard needed support for their Combat Service Support Very Small Aperture Terminals. The CSS VSATs provided a primary means of satellite communications for the first 72 hours after the storm, said Lt. Col. Gus Muller, the DWTS product lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know what the severity of the impact would be, so really it was wait-and-see. We knew that any of the military facilities on the island should be strong enough to withstand the hurricane, but what would be the impact to roads, communications lines, medical services? Would all lines of communication be cut? Those were all unknowns,\u201d Muller said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know the severity until we got initial reports back that they were establishing communications with the CSS VSAT and they needed support.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To better support comms on the island, Army leaders took an unprecedented step in enabling a CSS VSAT feature that hadn\u2019t been used before: opening up ports on the terminal that allowed for landline phone calls, Muller said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat way they could make voice-over-IP calls to other sites, not just to CONUS but all over the island, to facilitate communications,\u201d he said. \u201cTypically the way the CSS VSAT is set up is it\u2019s only to do direct communications with the network operations center, so that was waived to enable full communications in support of the disaster relief effort.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CSS VSAT functions vary by the teams using them and at any given time there are 4,000 terminals around the world connected to the DWTS Communications Network. For example, for the Army Corps of Engineers, the systems are used often to communicate with headquarters for supply, program status updates and, in particular, medical data transfers \u2013 digital X-rays or even live video consults and other telemedical services, which was crucial following the hurricane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe DWTS capability and support from the program office enabled 14th [Combat Support Hospital] to provide medical care for over 1,600 patients, test the Army\u2019s tele-behavior-health-in-a-bag devices, validate the [Defense Information Systems Agency] Global Video System with a medical unit in southwest Asia and 1st [Medical Brigade] at Ft. Hood, and enabled the Mobile Medic program to both validate capabilities and treat real-world patients in an expeditionary fashion under austere conditions,\u201d said Capt. Tom Mooney, 44th Medical Brigade NETOPS officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On-the-ground comms: a critical building block<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before the ad hoc networks, satcom capabilities and technological solutions can operate, it was critical to lay the groundwork ahead of time so those technologies would work, officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou have to remember it\u2019s really a partnership. There\u2019s a very prescribed process to ensure all aspects are coordinated,\u201d said Greg Garcia, Army Corps of Engineers CIO. \u201cWe had meetings two times a day to sync at the headquarters level, had liaisons at every major organization, and that cross-talk and deconfliction is a persistent required capability. It\u2019s not just the responders; a lot is up to the district, city, county, precinct or the territory that\u2019s involved, and they have a voice in it and that\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of putting the CSS VSATs to work in Puerto Rico, there was significant coordination between the DWTS program offices and the Rock Island Integrated Network Operations Center. That included daily notifications and updates of critical requirements and the status of support happening in the islands, Muller said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the Texas coast with days of relentless rain and catastrophic flooding, the 911 emergency infrastructure and Coast Guard phone lines were completely overwhelmed. As a solution, the Coast Guard rerouted phone lines to a large command center located at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, where rescue calls were answered, said Cmdr. Valerie Boyd, Coast Guard liaison officer to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was a unique and innovative solution to that problem,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cEvery response is different, and the demands are different. It was a major search and rescue event for Harvey. For Maria it was significant communications issues including our infrastructure for Rescue 21, which is how we monitor international distress for maritime, being completely down. We put Coast Guard cutters all over [the Caribbean] in order to maintain that capability and ensure we were available to complete our statutory missions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In these cases the existing infrastructure was overrun by the severity of the storms, but that doesn\u2019t make it any less important to have the infrastructure in place, particularly keeping that in mind when rebuilding after the storm, officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe tip of the day is that we have to have infrastructure that works before all this. If you have a local governance process that doesn\u2019t have contingency planning activities under way, and we fall in on top of that to help, it gets difficult,\u201d Garcia said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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After a series of hurricanes devastated the U.S., Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands, the Army stepped in to boost communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":68918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":8,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[8,106,29,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2772],"class_list":["post-22282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c2-comms","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"ROGCYV7PGVE47O2BG5MFODY2CQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/c2-comms\/2018\/01\/04\/how-a-new-satellite-terminal-feature-was-critical-to-puerto-ricos-recovery\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n