Creating and Enhancing Network Resilience Can Curtail Threats From Natural Disasters

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wavelengths, an Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast where we sit down with the biggest voices in your industry to break down major trends, technologies, and timely news that are shaping the larger telecom and broadband industries, and we get right into the meat of some actionable analysis that'll help you better understand the market and obviously get to work in your market. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b. Again, thanks for joining us. Always a pleasure sitting down behind the mic with the Amphenol team and talk and shop on some major trends and strategies for the industry. Before we get into today's topic, I want to make sure you're all caught up on previous episodes of the show. So make sure that you are subscribing to Wavelengths on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just hit that subscribe button, and you'll have a full catalog of previous episodes as well as notifications when we drop new episodes of the podcast. You can also find more educational resources, other episodes of the podcast, and more info on our solutions and services, obviously, at Amphenol broadband dot com. Again, that's Amphenol broadband dot com. Alright, team. Let's go ahead and jump in. For today's episode of the podcast, we are going to be discussing enhancing network resilience in the face of natural disasters. Right? So let's paint a picture that feels like it's becoming increasingly relevant in recent years. Imagine a coastal town battered by a hurricane. Right? Roads flooded, homes damaged, power lines down. In this kind of scenario, resilient broadband networks not only become a necessity, but a lifeline. Right? They keep communities connected. They facilitate emergency services. They enable rapid recovery efforts. But building and maintaining these networks to be resilient against natural disasters is no small feat. Right? It takes major coordination, and it takes understanding the environment, especially in disaster prone areas like the Gulf Coast or in areas that are ravaged by wildfires like California, for example. So our guest today, Rich Murtha, is senior vice president of OSP Engineering and Construction at Kinetic by Windstream. And he's going to be bringing a wealth of personal experience and industry experience to this discussion, whether it's his time at Windstream, whether it's his time at FEMA. He has spent time working with and leading network resilience efforts, and he's seen firsthand the challenges and the triumphs of keeping lines of communication open when disaster strikes. So with today's discussion, what we're going to do is we're going to contextualize our around some recent natural disasters, but, really, our goal here is to understand what does it take to build a resilient network infrastructure. Right? How should, the various stakeholders that are responsible for and concerned with the upkeep and maintenance of said infrastructure collaborate to make sure that it can withstand or quickly come back online in the face of natural disasters. We're gonna dive into that balance between cost of maintenance and resilience. Right? Especially in underserved areas. We're going to discuss and look at how some of, wind stream strategies specifically have prepared for upcoming hurricane seasons. We'll provide, obviously, some anecdotal experience from Rich here. But, again, we're gonna highlight the lessons learned and understand how Rich has approached maintaining and building resilient networks in the face of disasters and how that plays into a larger ecosystem of disaster recovery and how to prioritize disaster recovery, when dealing with bringing these networks back online or building them out to never go offline in the first place. So I'm pleased to welcome our guest, mister Rich Murtha, senior vice president of OSP Engineering and Construction at Kinetic by Windstream. Rich, welcome to the podcast, man. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Daniel. Thank you for inviting me and looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. It is a real pleasure getting to pull from your experience. Again, you have a storied career. Right? You've spent time with FEMA during hurricane Michael. You've led several, large scale operational teams around network resilience. I'm curious if you could just give our audience a little bit of a, elevator pitch background here on your experience because I think it's it's really important to understand the wealth of, you know, time and tangible experience that you have around building network resilience, whether that's teams, whether that's, helping to refine existing infrastructure, or help build out new resilient infrastructure. So give our audience that quick background here if you don't mind. Yep. No. Be glad to. My career began a long time ago at New York Telephone in New York City, where, obviously, in construction at that time, building, networks that were going to survive the capability of New York City and everything that, was what stood from there. Obviously, a, basically, a entirely buried substructure underneath the streets of New York. From there, I went up to, Western Massachusetts, as part of New England Telephone, where we built out a very rural, aerial type plant structure up there. From there, I went down to Bell Atlantic in, Virginia Beach. From there, I went to, Texas with the when Verizon merged, GTE and Bell Atlantic. Spent a long time, down there. Then, when Verizon merged with, FairPoint, that went back up and went to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont as the, vice president operations up there. So my background in construction is from a vast aspect of building different types of networks that were happened to be resilient to different types of weather conditions, whether it was a northeaster on the coast of Maine or it was, you know, fires and flooding in California or you know? And lastly, you know, like you said, I ended up working both in a telecom perspective on hurricane Michael in the Panhandle of Florida and then reverted and went to FEMA. So looking at it from a different perspective of how to rebuild that network, where we basically looked at a type five category hurricane that came in and removed every phone pole or electric pole that we had in the territory. So we had to build a network again from basically scratch. And when you have people searching, parking their cars on top of a bridge, trying to get a cell signal when there's none to be had because the power and everything's out. It really makes you take another look on how do we harden this network, how do we build, and how do we plan. And that's what I do today at Kinetic. I mean, pretty unmatched experience there, and so it's a real treat getting to learn from you today. And you're right, man. You've had experience dealing with network resilience in almost every weather condition. Right? We're talking the unpredictability of northeast weather. I'm not sure if you've had experience with some of these Texas freezes, but your time in Texas, hopefully, you didn't have to deal with these freezes because they can be brutal, and we don't know how to handle them around here. Wildfires in the west. Right? Panhandle of Florida, you know, category five hurricane. Your breadth of experience is wide. Right? But I'm curious to understand what some of the core foundations are here and how you approach your work. So, you know, if you had to break it down, what would you say are some of the key components of a resilient broadband network? Right? Particularly in areas that are prone to natural disasters where it's not infrequent, you know, to have to think about emergency response in a scaled, and almost cultural way. Right? Go ahead and break that down for us and where you see things like redundancy, for example, and root diversity factor into some of this resilience. Yeah. It that's a great question. And, you know, this year has been a particularly, tough year. You know, my team is in Iowa. We had multiple tornadoes come through Iowa this year. One was an EF five, three hundred and fifteen mile an hour winds. There's not much you're gonna build that's gonna withstand that type. We had Ruidoso, New Mexico, which experienced wildfires. And as soon as the fires were out, the rains came, so we had the flooding come back in right on top of that. So as we go to rebuild these, networks, we learn a lot, especially from flooding. You gotta look at, where do you put the electronics in the network? You know, should we put them up on raised pedestals? Looking at what is the flood zone. Right? You look at the the five year, ten year, fifty year, hundred year, five hundred year flood plan to understand that we look to move the electronics to make sure that we're able to, maintain that plant as we continue to go forward. So the working with the local municipalities and really getting local to understand what their needs are as a community and then looking at what our needs are. Because a lot of the central offices were built fifty, a hundred years ago. And if you look at the weather that's been coming on, the streams and rivers continue to rise, and the water continues to rise. So we're always looking for opportunities of where we can build into these networks, harden them so that they can survive. You know, we we look at the different types of, materials that we can place in the network. The the capability of knowing that a windstorm is gonna come in and, yeah, maybe it'll knock it down, but it won't break it, and we can put it right back up. So there's a lot of different things from my planning and engineering team that we look at, and we continue to work with the manufacturers, to create products that we can utilize to strengthen the network as we go along because there's nothing more precious than the ability to dial nine one one when you're in an emergency. And, you know, it's not like natural disasters or anything new. Obviously, your career is, you know, riddled with them and having to maneuver, maintaining or, like you said, completely rebuilding, network infrastructure from scratch in the wake of them. But I'm curious if you had to think back a little bit, and look at, you know, the early days of your career compared to now. What does the risk around broadband network infrastructure look like today compared to even twenty years ago, let's say. Right? Would you say that it's true from a standpoint of telecom companies that there is a greater risk, more frequency of, natural disasters? Is it just that the scope or the impact of these natural disasters has changed, you know, in the context of a more mature, and diversified set of network infrastructure assets, you know, that have obviously evolved with time and become more complex, perhaps more susceptible to minor damages. Just compare the field, even just twenty years ago to where we're at today. Well, I think when you look at twenty years ago versus where we are today, twenty years ago, you know, we did have a, a high-tech network. But what we were worried about at that time when we faced the storm was, CO to CO transport. Right? We were worried about interoffice facilities. Nowadays, I worry about, you know, some of the routes I get, for example, going from Montreal to New York City. You know? And, you know, you can only imagine the traffic that's on there or going from Raleigh to Jacksonville, Florida. You know, so when you prepare now, to build a route like that, you're looking to make sure wherever you are susceptible to getting hit by hurricanes, for example, you wanna make sure you have the best path there, and you look at the history of the storms that come up before. What areas are getting hit the hardest? And and you try to make sure you harden and protect that network. You also make sure that you back it up. You know, you put the diversity in the route so that if one leg gets hit, you do have the ability to reroute that traffic behind you so you can continue to keep that going. I think twenty years ago, we as we get hit by storms or whatnot, whether it was a tornado or a hurricane or flash flood, you know, the damages were more isolated to individual communities. Where today, when you have an outage that affects something, that same fiber that's on the pole could be feeding, you know, multiple municipalities instead of a single. So we we gotta look at things, a little bit more different as we move forward. So I wanna expand on some of your experience in the field too and, you know, draw some learning lessons from specific strategies you've deployed. Right? Let's start with one of the big ones. Right? This was your experience during your tenure at FEMA, during hurricane Michael. How did the telecom infrastructure of Florida, right, in the Panhandle, how did that fare during hurricane Michael? I know you mentioned that y'all had to basically get rid of all the infrastructure and then come back and set it back up from scratch. Tell us a little bit about, you know, why that was the strategy, how that compares to maybe how that situation would be handled today, and what you learned about network resilience and carrying out that massive statewide, you know, campaign, essentially? Well, the the biggest thing there was imagine the storm that it hit with a hundred and eighty-five mile an hour winds with a twenty-three foot tidal surge that just comes in, and it devastates everything. I mean, we had central offices that were gone. You know, the power grid was basically eliminated for over two weeks. You know, Tyndall Air Force Base down there outside of Panama City, every building was destroyed. So, you know, you're you're coming back. And what did we have? We had several central offices that were still up on battery or generator power, and we were providing those buildings to actually be a cooling shelter for senior citizens and a place where people could come and recharge their phones and be able to make a phone call so that they could contact their loved ones to say, I'm still alive. So, you know, when you look at the network and you look at what you have to do and, you know, we had, tower after tower that had to be adjusted because all the, all the hardware on the towers was obviously not left intact and had to be replaced or, redirected, to provide signal. You know, and, obviously, our first goal at that time is you look at the 911, the the emergency management system. So working collectively, I was working down there as vice president operations, with the state of Florida, in conjunction with FEMA, with the National Guard, with every other entity that was coming in, and, you know, it was basically all hands on deck. The electronics that was available out in the field, we were out there with generators, chaining them up and gassing them around the clock so that we could get a signal out there to help with the emergency responders that are in the network. You know, it reminds me of, you know, nine eleven with the ability of getting that done in New York City. You know, you talk about a natural disaster being a hurricane, there's also manmade disasters that we have to evolve to in this line of business that we do every day. So the there's a lot of lessons learned. There are a lot of places where we had electronics before that we decided, you know what? We're not going to rebuild there. We're going to go to higher ground. There were a lot of places where instead of having wooden poles, we went back with aluminum or we went back with concrete to make sure that we were hardened. A lot of locations where you sit there and you change from aerial to buried, you know, because it tends to survive a little bit better. But, it really makes you change your strategy of how you prepare for the next event. Let's talk coordination a little bit here. You mentioned now that, you know, some of the realities of how, fiber infrastructure is built out, for example, is that you have multiple municipalities being fed, you know, by the same infrastructure. So if infrastructure goes down for one, it's very likely that it's going to have a decentralized effect across a region, and it's not just this one small city or town, you know, who you can kind of isolate and fix in a, in a bubble. Right? How does that change how, telecom pros like yourself, who were invested in and responsible for network resilience, how does that change how y'all approach the collaboration with key local officials to execute on these kinds of strategies as well as, stakeholders in the community who are involved with the maintenance or upkeep of, this infrastructure sort of in a in a downstream fashion? Right? Tell us a little bit about those changing dynamics and any strategies that you would give to the industry to make sure that that coordination is, you know, on point, essentially. That all needed communications are present and, that coordination on specific efforts are made clear, and, you know, using resources in an efficient manner. Yeah. I I think the biggest thing there is creating multiple paths. You cannot isolate yourself to a single cable or a single direction. You gotta make sure that you're looking for a diverse path, of being able to provide service to a community, to, emergency management centers. You gotta you know, a hurricane is one thing. You get about, you know, a week ahead of time to be able to prepare for that. But when a tornado comes in, maybe you get fifteen minutes notice. So the ability to prepare for these, different types of events is hard. So having, my planners and engineers sit there and look at the areas that we're going into, you know, especially in some of these underserved communities, with the different programs that we're building out. And we're looking for diverse paths. We're looking to partner with people we've never partnered with before, different utility companies, to be able to get access upon their poll line or happen to, you know, basically do a geographical study to find out what is the makeup of the ground. Can we plow there? Do we have to bore there? Where do we have to get so that we can build these routes? So that all goes into the thinking and working within these communities, becoming local, meeting with the highway departments, meeting with the department of transportation, and meeting with the community and the themselves to find out what's important to them as we develop and build out that network. Let's hone in on a, different natural disaster example here. Right? We've talked a bit about hurricanes. Let's look at fires now. Very different type of damage, but similarly, impactful to say the least. The desolation, that can be left on infrastructure from fires, is equally as, you know, devastating. Right? And so we've seen a lot of recent wildfires this year, and last year, California, Canada, Hawaii. Right? I'm curious your thoughts then in the wake of some of these recent wildfires, how you've seen telecom companies, right, with firm, and established infrastructure in the area. How have they responded to some of these, you know, major wildfires, especially when they spring up so quickly, and the damage seems to sweep over the territory faster than folks can respond? How do they approach reactive response to something like that when, again, it's so hard to, anticipate the immediate moment? Right? We'll get to proactive strategies for that here in a second, but what are your thoughts on on reactive response, especially when the damage spreads so quickly? Well, you know, like you said, that damage, hits so quickly. One of the things you have to do when you have a area that is prone to fires is, you know, you look to eliminate the majority of your right of way. So if we're able to move our pole line now along the roadway, along an open right of way, that's not overbuilt. You know, we try to make sure that we're, tree trimming, taking advantage, making sure that there's nothing, on our cables that would potentially lead to it. But there there's no way to harden, that network, the the copper or the fiber from a burning fire, that gets picked up with the wind like you saw in Hawaii. That that fire came in, with winds from a hurricane, but there was no rain. Right? The rain stayed offshore, but eighty-five mile an hour winds came in. And all it took was a spark, and you lost an entire community and an entire network there. So it's, you know, trying to prepare for that is very difficult at best. Again, that's where we look with you if you're building back. Get away from the wooden telephone pole. Let's go to a concrete pole. Let's go to an aluminum pole. Let's put the cable underground. Let's, look at opportunities in those type of areas of what we can do. You know, we just got hit with one in, New Mexico. The fire was devastating, and it just it took everything. It took the businesses. It took the homes. And, again, we ended up working with FEMA to to build shelters so that the people had a place to stay. We worked with the, with our folks out there, from the Navajo Nation to help, get across certain properties so that we could restore communication and get that back up. So it's a fire is a tough one to come back from. So then I imagine a lot of the most important work comes earlier, right, on the proactive front of designing networks, designing redundancies, coordinating response plans that can be, you know, executed on in the wake of something unprecedented and unexpected. Right? And designing networks from the ground up to be able to withstand a lot of that damage or at the very least, you know, be able to, quickly, get back online once the damage is over, based on, you know, certain strategies for replacing fiber, for example, or, telephone poles, for example. So, I'm curious what the proactive side of that strategy then looks like, especially in regions that are known for wildfires and where that is a very real threat constantly. How would you recommend, some of these operators design their network infrastructure from the ground up to be more resilient if that's really even possible in the face of, you know, massive wildfires. What are your thoughts there? Well, we don't have a fireproof cable. If only. Yeah. I mean, we do internally in our CEOs and whatnot, but that is not going to be cost effective to put in the network. But in the network, you know, we have to make sure we position, for example, fiber loops with the ability to go back and be able to pull down, to do replacement of fiber quickly in areas that we know are prone to certain types of damages. So that when we go back out there, we can quickly know that, hey. Half a mile away, we got two hundred feet of slack that we can, pull forward, run some new fiber and get down here and restore quickly. Because some of these storms, you know, a tornado might take out two, three, four, five miles of fiber and poli. And, you know, you have to rebuild that as quick as can be. The big thing is to always be prepared. Right? It's to make sure that you're doing regular maintenance on your generators so that you know if something hits overnight that you're not planning for, that you're ready to go and that we can pull a trailer out there and we can provide it. To me, it's, you know, one of the last things I talk to technicians about around the country. Every night when you come in, do you top off the tank on the truck just in case we get hit with an emergency? Are we making sure we get everything loaded up with supplies? In case the storm comes in at midnight, we got to turn around and get back out there at three in the morning. That's not the time to go through the supply room. So we got to do a good job of making sure our people are ready, whether it's an engineer or planner or construction tech, a slicer, a lineman that, we know that we're always ready to go because the country and the and the people are counting on us to get this network up. I think it's a great lesson that we learned with COVID, of how many people were looking for a place to find a Wi Fi signal so their kids could do homework. And we really found out how important our network is to people, especially the ones that were ending up working from home and whatnot. And as we continue to build these networks out to support, more rural type customers, on the farmlands, in the middle of the country, we gotta make sure that we're building a network that is capable of withstanding these type of environments, whether you're in Nebraska and it's ninety degrees in a summer day. And then, you know, a couple of months later in the middle of winter and it's minus forty with, you know, sixty mile an hour wind blowing. We gotta make sure that same network can withstand all the different elements that we're faced with. You brought up a good point that I want to hone in on as we close our conversation here, but you brought up the realities of having to balance the cost of building resilient infrastructure with, obviously, the need to, you know, outweigh the potential cost of having to replace infrastructure. Right? And sort of that balance of, well, how cost effective is it for us to invest more early on proactively to then save us more funds on the response and rebuild process. But also the realities of is it even cost effective to invest in something like fireproof wire across our whole infrastructure. Right? Answer being likely no because it's just doesn't make sense economically. So I'm curious how, you know, you see, operators balance that tricky equation there and how you have approached that question in a practical, forward looking sense. Right? How do you weigh out some of these short term versus long term costs around resilient infrastructure? And what are some of the most cost effective investments that pay off in the long run, but also aren't gonna break the bank in the short term? Yeah. I I think one of the things we've been doing, is to work with our fiber providers and to try to be on the cutting edge of new technology, whether, you know, it's, moving to flat fire. Right? So initially, we had twelve and twenty-four, and now we're up to forty-eight, with a flat that we're testing. So, you know, the capability of making sure, you know, one of the things we found in the first test was they put steel on there. And our techs hated it because they were chewing up their shears when they were trying to open it. So we went back to Kevlar instead of the steel. So the you know, there's a lot of things we can do working with our partners of what's needed to be able to go in the areas. You know, the game plan that my team takes is every time we have an issue or whatnot, we're looking to retire copper network. Right? We're looking to move as many customers off of copper onto fiber and to continue to grow that fiber network because that you know, at Kinetic, we wanna be a fiber provider, across the country. So we're looking for those opportunities, make sure that we make good investments, whether it's a new type of pedestal, whether it's a new type of aerial closure. We're looking for every opportunity to make sure that we're building the best network we can for our customers because what we want to be known for as we go into these new networks is quality. What I ask my team for three things every day. I ask for quality, I ask for consistency, and I ask for one and done. I want to go there one time, I wanna do the job right, and I wanna be done and have a happy customer at the end of it. The, slightly more weighty version of make your bed the right way the first time. Right? Exactly. Though we're dealing with billions of dollars of telecom infrastructure instead. Yeah. That's a, that's a learning lesson that stuck with me, you know, a lot growing up. And I you know, sometimes it's the simplest advice that makes the most sense. Yes. Get out there, do the research, and understand the needed investments the first time so that once because, you know, these are things that are unavoidable. Once disaster does strike again, we're not facing the same problems and asking the same questions a second, a third, a fourth time. Right? Being honest and sober about what's, really possible and executing on that front, is gonna make for more resilient networks, but also a team, I'd say, that's more capable of responding to the unexpected and capable of shifting gears too when necessary, when strategies prove that we thought this was gonna work two years ago, but now, you know, because of changes in technology, new infrastructure, new, you know, new gear, or the severity of the disasters. Right? We have to now change our tune to match the times. So, you know, a lot of a lot of useful nuggets of strategy to chew on here to close things out. But, Rich, thank you so much for your time here on the podcast. For any final pieces of advice, any words of wisdom here for our listeners, as we gear up for the tail end of summer, you know, here in Texas, we're a little further out from another freeze, but you never know. Nowadays, they tend to rear their head exactly when we think we're just over the, you know, hump of disaster. What advice would you give for regions to hone in on their collaborative strategies with more proactivity, to start to get ahead of some of these investments, some of these coordinated efforts, and to map out needed redundancies in the face of, you know, some of the most common natural disasters that we see on the horizon? Yeah. That's a great question. And, you know, like you said, it is regional in approach. You know, northern New England is more worried about a nor'easter or that winter storm. I personally live in Southern Florida where we're always worried about that next hurricane that's coming in. Texas, you got either the heat that hits you all summer or you got that ice storm that comes in. And in Texas, you guys know that you just keep building the roads higher, off the ground, and, then you got four-wheel drive, so you must be able to drive on ice. But it's definitely. It's the preparation that goes into it. It's always thinking ahead and being prepared for what is gonna be the, the case that comes in. We should never be surprised. We should have a plan, to do and a plan to react. And it's about working with your teams to make sure that they're always thinking ahead. It's about making sure that, you never get to a stockpile where you only have one pole left in the yard. You you gotta make sure that you have, available resources to be able to react when a tornado hits. You know? So it's having good people on your team. It's having the logistical support to make sure that you have, equipment available in the warehouse, and the ability to get it transported. And it's about driving the people and the behavior to know that, you know, one thing we do well in the communications world is we handle disasters very well. We all pitch in together, whether you're electric company, cable company, telephone company, and we lean together to get the job, done. It's gonna be a team effort. Yeah. It's a common theme here on the podcast. Most of the major trends and strategies we break down tend to reveal, just how important it is to bring every stakeholder to the table in mapping out these kinds of short and long-term strategies, especially when we're talking about investing in infrastructure that's meant to be resilient, whether that's resilient to, incoming technological innovations and trends or whether that's resiliency against natural disasters. So I appreciate you giving us those final words of wisdom. Rich, thank you so much for your analysis on the podcast today. It's really been a pleasure to, look into your, you know, your background and your experience to really suss out, you know, what strategies are most impactful, for creating resilient networks in the face of natural disasters and how we can retool our perspectives to make sure that we're, you know, writing that right balance of necessary investments, that are region appropriate and then also don't break the short term bank because that's obviously always important. So thank you again. We've been chatting today, folks, with Rich Murtha, senior vice president of OSP Engineering and Construction at Kinetic by Windstream. Rich, it's been a pleasure. If folks wanna learn more about the work that you're doing at Kinetic by Windstream, or they maybe wanna get in touch with Kinetic by Windstream and, tap into some of your services, how can they learn more? How can they get in touch? Oh, my email is richard.murtha@windstream.com, and, be glad to answer any questions that come in. Fantastic. And, for y'all's website to learn more about Kinetic by Windstream, where should we point folks? Windstream dot com. Easy enough. Like when it's nice and simple. Alright, Rich. Thank you so much for your time. It's really been great, and I'm looking forward to continued conversations as, obviously, we see more natural disasters in the future. There's gonna be more, and strategies are gonna keep refining themselves. So there's gonna be more opportunities to pull from your experience and learn, you know, what the best response and best proactive strategies are for the times. So till then, Rich, thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you everyone for tuning in to today's episode of Wavelengths, an Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast. If you like what you heard today and you wanna tap into previous episodes, make sure, again, you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for notifications every time we drop a new episode. And for more information about our solutions and services, you can head to amphenol broadband dot com. Again, that's Amphenol broadband dot com. Alright, folks. We'll catch you on the next episode of the show. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b, and we'll catch you again on the next episode of Wavelengths.