James Breeden, CEO of LiveAir Networks, one of our customers and also an agent, recently read Larry Browne's blog post about his volunteer work with the fire department and responded with this account of how OnSIP helped the City of Smithville's response to the Bastrop County Complex Wildfire.
September 4, 2011: Bastrop County Complex Wildfire
The fire actually broke out on Sunday, Sep. 4. On Monday, Sep 5, the citizens of Smithville, Texas awoke to virtually no cell phone service, no landline phone service, limited cable television service and a major wildfire only single-digit miles west of town. AT&T, local landline carrier in Smithville, suffered a few major fiber cuts/burns along Hwy 71, right in the middle of the wildfire zone between Smithville and Bastrop. The AT&T infrastructure had no protected route, taking cell tower backhaul, local and long distance, landline, 911, etc. offline. Time Warner Cable also had one of their 2 routes into Smithville burned to a toasty crisp which messed up services for their Internet and phone customers for a good period of time.
These outages by ATT and TWC literally disconnected 90% of our community from 911, police, fire, and other critical community services. More importantly, our police and fire command center, utilities office in town, and disaster shelters (3 of them at this point) were completely cut off via telephone from the county’s Emergency Operations Center in Bastrop.
LiveAir's network operations are dual fed, one side dependent on Austin (via Time Warner Cable fiber) and the other side on a diverse route back East towards Houston (Level 3 fiber). While AT&T and Time Warner had fiber problems on their Austin-Smithville links, our network core was 100% functioning, peers up, and protection up - operations as normal.
Springing into Action
Once LiveAir figured out the true extent of the outage in town and that so many critical community services were not reliably working, our teams rolled out to the community centers. The City of Smithville has used LiveAir’s dedicated Ethernet access services for years for Internet access for utilities operations, fire, police, parks and recreation, and city government functions, so it was very easy for the LiveAir Networks team to drop Polycom handsets at Police, City Hall, and Recreation Center to get those entities back able to make phone calls.
Given that the local switching office was offline, LiveAir assigned DIDs from its facilities-based Fayette County (La Grange) pool to the temporary services so they could call each other and receive public calls. LiveAir also dropped temporary network and phone service into the disaster donations collections center that was organized downtown in an old Family Dollar store.
All communications were re-established for these critical community centers within 3 hours of the morning landline outages; communications to the donation center was established about 4 hours later as LiveAir’s network construction team had to physically build new facilities to that building.
During the critical first hours and days of the Bastrop County Complex Wildfires at a time when we had basically no means of communication, LiveAir was able to step up and get us the tools in reestablishing contact to the E.O.C. I cannot thank Mr. Breeden and his company enough on behalf of the City of Smithville - Mayor Mark A. Bunte.
In the following weeks...
For almost a week, our LiveAir’s internet service and VoIP powered by OnSIP was the only reliable communications in town for the city, emergency operations, local shelters, donation coordination, etc. AT&T finally got services restored 3 or 4 days later. Time Warner suffered on and off outages for the next 3 weeks after the fire. But, LiveAir’s IP and voice services stayed online and available during the entire disaster activity period.
WiFi services and computer lab operations at the shelters kept evacuees informed and in tune to media and reports as to what was happening. Access to Facebook was invaluable to everyone to share information. But, being able to call each other and hear voices were, to many, the best things of all as so many lost everything to the fire... not to mention the fact that public safety and disaster management operations were able to get back to work quickly to better control the disaster.
City of Smithville parks and recreation director (and volunteer firefighter) Andis Goble said “As in many small towns, most people wear many hats. As a firefighter I fought the Bastrop County Complex Fire for the first 30 hours, but within the first hour of the fire I had already opened our city’s recreation center as a shelter. After being relieved from the fire, my first stop was the recreation center/shelter and to my surprise LiveAir Networks had already hooked up Internet phones that allowed us to serve our patrons and manage the shelter effectively. Given that the city's phone system was down for days, and cell phones were sketchy at best, the LiveAir phones very well could have saved lives.
"Our VOIP network, powered by OnSIP, came to the rescue when everything else in town had failed. I'm positive that we couldn't have deployed another solution at the sheer speed we did that morning to make calls happen again," said James Breeden, CEO of LiveAir Networks.
James and his team are going to write a case study next month on this experience. We are glad that OnSIP helped the city by doing its bit.
About LiveAir Networks
LiveAir Networks is one of the Central Texas region’s leading technical services providers. Since 2003, LiveAir has invested over $750,000 in its Central Texas infrastructure covering over 2400 square miles of Bastrop, Fayette and Lee counties of Texas including the towns of Smithville, Giddings, Lexington, La Grange, and Flatonia. LiveAir’s privately owned and operated Metro Ethernet network delivers rural customers unparalleled client service and connectivity that ensures speed, reliability, and performance. With LiveAir, businesses and residents alike can count on robust broadband, voice, information technology, and Internet-based solutions created and supporting by uncompromising technical experts.