The Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Tony Riddick and his team are still hacking away with machetes to clear paths to cell towers knocked out of commission by last year’s hurricanes, according to StateScoop. Both Riddick and his counterpart in Puerto Rico, CIO Luis Arocho, compared notes at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers Midyear Conference in Baltimore recently.
“I’ve never seen so much destruction,” Riddick said. Plans are slowly underway in the Virgin Islands to put their power, telephone, and fiber optic lines underground at a cost of about $330 million, he said.
FEMA officials said many of the area’s 103,000 homes are still covered by blue tarps. Riddick said the first emergency cell tower they put up in the aftermath of the storm lasted eight hours after the generator powering it was stolen, he said.
Riddick admitted the Virgin Islands were ill-prepared since the last major hurricane affecting the infrastructure was in 1989, well before the growth in technology.
“Have a backup of your backup,” Riddick told the audience. Specifically, he told his fellow CIOs to advise the governments they serve to put one backup in a separate facility and another in a cloud provider.
Arocho cited NetHope, a humanitarian organization backed by tech companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Facebook, that restores IT services to disaster-stricken areas and Google’s Project Loon, balloons carrying LTE signal generators, as helping mitigate the devastation, StateScoop reported.
“Make sure you learn from our experience,” Arocho told his audience. “Make sure you have the things you need on-site. That was one of our key issues: getting things on the island.”
April 30, 2018
Reader Interactions