A team of professionals from Mobile County’s 911 Center has been deployed to Asheville, North Carolina, to assist with search and rescue operations following the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.
) - A team of professionals from Mobile County’s 911 Center has been deployed to Asheville, N.C., to assist with search and rescue operations following the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.“We have the resources and the personnel to do it, so very easy decision to send them up there,” said Director of the 911 center, Roy Hodge.“Cell phone service is down, no internet, radio communications is down, even public safety radio systems are non existent up there now,” said Hodge.
To help, the team bought along a mobile tower site almost like a cell phone tower that has Starlink Internet access. After my interview with Hodge, we got a call from a member of the team who described what it was like working on the side of a mountain. “There’s no running water,” said Robert Jackson. “There’s no power and there’s no cell phone service … so we have to create our own communication infrastructure. So a lot of the challenges were facing our due to the mountains. Some of these mountain peaks are 4200 feet. So it’s difficult to get radio signal and around them and into the valleys the guys are searching into that creates a lot of difficulties when most communications equipment is designed for flat land.
Jackson says locals have shown great hospitality, “We have a Starlink terminal on our tower truck here that we’re allowing them to use to call out to talk to family to let people know they’re okay or even to try to start the search for other loved ones who are missing. So they have been quite kind and feeding us. Our thoughts are with everybody that are here. I just can’t describe the level of devastation this area has seen. There are entire towns that don’t exist anymore.
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