Which Communities Go Dark in a Storm?

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast and drove more than 400 miles inland, into the southern Appalachians, mountain country that does not expect hurricanes. The storm devastated valleys and hollows. Roads were washed out, and in many places the power stayed off for weeks. In Henderson County, North Carolina, local internet provider Morris Broadband went dark. For 80 hours, or more than three days, its network was down. The households and businesses that depended on the network spent those days cut off, just when they needed to reach family members or file insurance claims. On broadband coverage maps, Henderson County is counted as “served.” On the other hand, broadband infrastructure in the county had not been built to survive a storm like Helene, and nothing in the way we ordinarily measure broadband would have informed local stakeholders of these vulnerabilities. Closing that gap is what my colleagues and I set out to do. In earlier work in rural Nebraska, we found that an internet service provider’s advertised speed and a household’s actual experience of using the internet can be worlds apart. Disasters expose a second, harsher version of the same problem. Broadband can show up on every coverage map and still go down the week people need it most. So, we built a tool to measure each community’s risk of losing broadband. When a storm keeps people indoors, the home connection is what carries telehealth visits and kids’ schoolwork, and a coverage map says nothing about whether that connection will hold up. The tool flags the places most likely to go dark in a natural disaster, so broadband offices and emergency managers can harden networks and stage backup equipment before the next storm hits.

[Jesse R. Andrews is a postdoctoral research associate at Texas Tech University’s Center of Excellence in Capacity-building for Resilient Housing (CECREH), where he studies flood risk, housing resilience, and the rural digital divide.]