Helene-Affected Areas Showing Improvement, Still Facing Outages

The FCC expanded the reporting area for communications outages caused by Hurricane Helene to include counties in Tennessee and Virginia and additional counties in South Carolina, said a public notice in Monday’s Daily Digest. Reports from the affected counties show communications services experiencing outages from the storm but improving.

The disaster information reporting system and the mandatory disaster response initiative have already been activated for some counties in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Monday’s DIRS report shows numerous cell outages in North Carolina, with 54% of cellsites in affected areas down. That’s an improvement from 66.4% on Sunday. Tennessee has 13.8% of affected cellsites down and Virginia 6.8%. Florida has just 0.7% of cellsites down in affected areas, Georgia 6% and South Carolina 9.3%. As in North Carolina, all the affected states showed improvement from the previous day. Cable and wireline companies reported 886,139 subscribers without service in the affected counties, as compared with 1,004,610 in Sunday’s report. Two TV stations are out of service in Georgia and two in North Carolina, and 38 radio stations are down across the affected area, the DIRS report said.

The Wireless and the Public Safety bureaus issued a public notice Friday extending deadlines for licensees and applicants in affected areas. Deadlines for applications, reports and other filings due from Sept. 23 to Oct. 23 are extended to Oct. 24, the PN said. Those making delayed filings “must include with those filings a certification made under penalty of perjury that the deadlines could not be met within the time otherwise provided in the Commission’s rules because of Hurricane Helene,” the PN said. It also waives filing requirements for special temporary authority requests to allow them to be made over the phone.

Several companies also announced relief efforts related to Helene. Verizon said Monday that it will waive “domestic call/text/data usage” from Sept. 28 to Oct. 5 for customers in affected counties in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. “We understand the challenges our customers are facing, and by expanding our relief offer, we hope to provide some peace of mind as they focus on recovery,” said Atlantic South Market President Leigh Anne Lanier. Beasley Media announced a partnership with the Red Cross to run public service announcements calling for donations to support hurricane victims.

The hurricane response shows why lawmakers should “act now to protect AM radio," said National Religious Broadcasters CEO Troy Miller in an email release. "This hurricane once again highlights the crucial role of local radio as a lifeline in times of crisis,” said NRB. “Local radio broadcasters have been delivering critical updates and messages of encouragement nonstop, even as power lines and cell towers fail.”