House Commerce Chairman Pallone Requests Investigation of Communications Failures in US Territories Following Hurricane Maria

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) sent a letter to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) urging the government watchdog to investigate and evaluate months-long communication failures and restoration efforts in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands following Hurricane Maria in 2017.  As part of his request, Chairman Pallone wrote that the Federal Communications Commission’s response to Hurricane Maria raises serious questions about the state of our communications infrastructure. One day after the storm made landfall, the FCC reported that 95 percent of the cell sites in Puerto Rico and 76 percent of cell sites in the US Virgin Islands were out of service.  Two months following the storm, FCC reported that 36 percent of cell sites in Puerto Rico and 37 percent of cell sites in the US Virgin Islands were still out of service. “The communications network failures in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were deeply detrimental to their residents, and may have even caused additional deaths in Puerto Rico,” Pallone wrote to GAO.  “Ensuring the resiliency and reliability of communications networks in the United States has been a top priority of mine.  To prevent similar failures in the future, it is critical that we understand what happened during the hurricane and its aftermath, and what could be improved.”