As wind-driven wildfires broke out on the Hawaiian island of Maui last summer, killing more than 100 people and destroying thousands of buildings, a telecommunications blackout kept many residents in the dark.
The outage exacerbated an already devastating situation in areas such as the town of Lahaina, home to around 13,000 people, where both evacuation orders and first responders' emergency communications were hampered.
"We need to understand what the limitations of networks might be and also have plans that would account for the possible loss of our typical sources of information," said Jenifer Sunrise Winter, a communications professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa.Last month, wildfire damage to fibre lines near Fort Nelson, B.C. caused days-long cellular and internet outages in the province's north, as well as in Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
"At a time when our networks continue to grow in complexity and the threats we face, including from extreme weather or malicious actors, are as volatile and unpredictable as they've ever been, the consequences of not being prepared are dire."Canada's three largest providers say robust plans are in place to mitigate the effects of wildfires on their infrastructure.
"The sooner we can detect something ... the better because we could use that to dispatch our resources more quickly on the ground." "In an emergency situation, people are seeing as a great alternative or redundant connection because you can literally take it with you," said Rob McMahon, associate professor of media and technology at the University of Alberta.McMahon noted the limitations of the "untested" satellite technology, including potential capacity issues compared with fibre.
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