After Helene: Building a Shared Plan for Communications Resilience
Two years after Hurricane Helene, the Western North Carolina Regional Communications Resiliency Plan is now available. It carries the experiences of people who lived through the storm, worked through its disruptions, and gave their time to help the region prepare for what comes next.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve spent more than 500 hours developing this plan, writing its content and working through how to organize and present it. The responsibility I felt throughout was to the people whose experiences gave the document its substance.
Survivors and responders described what they had lived through, how they found ways to communicate, and what they wanted to be better prepared for next time.
Their voices shaped the work from the beginning.
A plan built through listening
Many planning efforts I’ve participated in began with existing doctrine or academic study. This one began with people’s experiences. While established frameworks helped inform the response to what we heard, it was the participants’ experiences that formed the foundation while their needs and observations determined the priorities.
The effort brought together 113 stakeholders across Buncombe, Henderson, Madison, and Transylvania counties. Emergency managers, first responders, public safety, communications providers, utilities, government leaders, community organizations, and advocates brought different perspectives on the same regional disruption.
Through listening sessions, mapping exercises, and follow-up reviews, they described damaged infrastructure, improvised solutions, difficult handoffs, and the needs they struggled to meet. Where experiences differed, and there were some, those differences were recorded. Conditions varied across the region, and people’s responsibilities affected what they could see.
I think of this as their plan. They contributed the knowledge that made it possible and helped define what it needed to accomplish. Working with Sara Nichols and Land of Sky Regional Council, alongside ITDRC, my role was to listen carefully and turn that knowledge into something useful.
The dependencies between systems and people
For those of us working in emergency communications, Helene reinforced how closely communications infrastructure depends on other infrastructure and the organizations operating it.
The plan documents shared fiber routes and physical corridors that undermined perceived redundancy. Providers depended on power, transportation access, fuel, and the networks carrying their traffic. Responders and communities depended on those providers. A generator’s usefulness depended on whether someone could reach it with fuel. Repair crews needed access to damaged facilities and workable arrangements for restoring connections. Regional ISPs depended on information they may or may not have known existed, and equally as important, resources they did not have.
These dependencies influenced how disruption spread and how restoration progressed.
Failures overlapped, and their timing and duration varied by location. Restoring an individual component did not necessarily restore the connections people needed.
The seams between systems became an important part of the analysis: where cellular service connects to landline infrastructure, where local radio systems connect with statewide networks, and where public agencies coordinate with commercial providers.
Understanding those connections required knowledge distributed across organizations.
A provider could explain a transport dependency.
A responder could describe what losing that connection meant for an operation.
A community organization could explain who remained unable to reach help or receive information.
Putting those experiences together helped reveal needs that would have been difficult to understand from any one organization’s perspective.
Participants also described considerable ingenuity.
Industry partners deployed alternative links and power sources.
Responders adapted available equipment and used established relationships to solve problems across boundaries.
Community and faith-based organizations shared connectivity and became places people could turn for information.
Those efforts belong in the story. They show the capability and commitment already present in the region, and they helped inform what the plan proposes to strengthen.
Coordination, interoperability, and reaching people
Coordination was the gap participants voiced most consistently. People described the need for better ways to share information, understand available resources, integrate mutual aid, and work across organizational boundaries. That became the cornerstone of the plan.
Interoperability was closely connected. Alongside damaged infrastructure and capacity constraints, participants described policy, process, and coordination barriers that affected their ability to communicate using available systems. Radio programming, shared procedures, and arrangements for incoming mutual-aid teams all mattered.
The plan also records examples of coordination helping the response. Existing relationships supported problem-solving across boundaries. State-level ESF-2 coordination calls provided a place to share information, align priorities, and work through issues such as fiber restoration permitting. Those experiences offered practices the region could build on.
Another concern that stayed with me was whether communications met the needs of vulnerable and underserved populations. Non-English-speaking communities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people with visual impairments or medical disabilities, and older adults face different barriers to receiving and acting on information.
Participants described the consequences of losing access to relay services, trusted bilingual information, and contact with care providers. Those experiences informed recommendations for language and disability access, trusted messengers, community access points, and ways to communicate during prolonged outages.
For the ESF-2 community, industry, and broadband policymakers, these findings connect infrastructure decisions to the people relying on them. Route diversity, backup power, repair access, training, and accessible public information all contribute to whether communications remain useful during a disruption.
Eight goals for communications resilience
The work produced 42 proposed solutions across eight goal areas:
Redundant Communications Systems: Understand shared dependencies and strengthen the alternatives available when primary services are disrupted.
Cross-Agency and Cross-Sector Coordination: Establish shared arrangements for information, resources, mutual aid, and continued regional collaboration.
Technology Access and Training: Help people obtain, understand, and practice using the communications tools their roles require.
Pre-Disaster Planning and Alerts: Prepare coordinated, accessible ways to inform people, including options for prolonged network outages.
Resilience Hubs and Community Access: Develop places where residents can access information, power, and connectivity, with attention to underserved communities.
Infrastructure Hardening: Address physical exposure, backup power, fuel, repair access, and alternative backhaul.
Regulatory and Policy: Improve the permitting, right-of-way coordination, and investment conditions that affect restoration and resilience.
Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Keep capabilities, contacts, priorities, and lessons current through regular review and stakeholder feedback.
The goals are connected. A community hub needs reliable power and connectivity, people prepared to operate it, accessible information, and a place in local emergency plans. Infrastructure investment benefits from shared knowledge of routes and dependencies. Interoperability requires continuing work across organizational boundaries.
That is why the plan proposes a Regional Emergency Communications Coordination Framework, with Land of Sky Regional Council in a convening role. It gives partners a shared way to pursue the work while preserving their individual responsibilities and operational independence.
The plan also proposes an infrastructure audit and communications contingency planning as early steps. These help partners understand what they depend on, what alternatives they have, and where coordinated investment could make a difference.
The work ahead
Publication only makes the plan available for people to use. Its recommendations still require local decisions, willing partners, resources, and sustained work. Priorities will develop through regional coordination, informed by urgency, local conditions, partner readiness, and available funding.
The plan is intended to evolve as that work progresses. Continued input from responders, providers, community organizations, and residents will help keep it relevant. Other regions can also draw from the approach and adapt what is useful to their own circumstances.
For me, the relationships built through this effort are among its most meaningful outcomes. I’ve connected with people doing remarkable work to improve resilience across Western North Carolina. I look forward to continuing alongside them and carrying what I’ve learned into work with other communities.
The plan is dedicated to those lost during Hurricane Helene, and to the communities, responders, neighbors, and stakeholders whose voices built it.
Prepared by The Ruckus Group LLC for the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC) and Land of Sky Regional Council. The published plan credits Rodney Cooper and Sara Nichols as authors. Funding was provided through Land of Sky Regional Council via the Appalachian Regional Commission.
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