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NCS Responds to Hurricane Gustav Arlington, VA. September 01, 2008 - The National Communications System (NCS) is playing an active role in the Nation’s response to Hurricane Gustav, a category-2 hurricane impacting a large area of the U.S. Gulf Coast. The NCS’ National Coordinating Center for Communications (NCC) is working a 24x7 schedule and coordinating with the communications industry and with regional communications coordinators in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Regions IV and VI. The NCS is supporting the two federal regions in support of Emergency Support Function-2 (communications), positioning six people at Region Response Coordination Centers in Atlanta, Ga. (Region IV) and 22 NCS members at Denton, Texas (Region VI). The NCS is also working with General Service Administration regional managers to ensure priority restoration as required and is deploying its Army reserve cadre to the regions. To support front line responders, the NCS also stationed staff at the Joint Field Office in Baton Rouge, La., and is supporting the FEMA National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) in Washington. As of today, the NCS has received 205 restoration requests and 12 provisioning requests under the Telecommunications Service Priority (TSP) program. The NCS issued six TSP circuits to the FEMA Joint Field Office in Orlando, FL, and nine restoration requests from the Department of Agriculture for Louisiana and Mississippi. In addition, the NCS has received nearly 100 restoration requests from the Louisiana National Guard and six emergency TSP provisions from the Texas Forest Service for their resource staging areas. TSP staff at the NCS is on call to issue additional restoration and provisioning requests when needed. Another priority is getting emergency communications response personnel into the affected areas to restore and maintain communications facilities. Working with the Joint Field Offices, state and local leaders and regional law enforcement, the NCC effectively coordinated access for private sector communications workers to begin restoration and recovery work. Also this morning, the NCS activated the Shared Resources (SHARES) High Frequency Radio Network combining its efforts with FEMA’s National Emergency Coordination Network and the Center for Disease Control’s National Public Health Radio Network. The NCC is conducting daily conference calls with industry representatives, and ESF-2 personnel to review issues, deployments and restoration activities. Telecommunications industry representatives continue to monitor networks and manage traffic in evacuations areas. The NCS continues to be successful with gaining industry access and is working with industry on their needs for storage. Administrators of the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS) are able to issue GETS cards and WPS authorization for those authorized users of these priority communications services. The NCC is an active participant in FEMA operational conference calls, and conducted its first conference call with government communications support personnel on August 28. In addition, the NCC conducts a daily conference call with the members of the Communications Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC). Furthermore, the NCC is coordinating with state officials to provide security, access and fuel resources for ESF-2 personnel (both industry and government). Information on major NCS priority service communications
programs is available at http://gets.ncs.gov,
http://wps.ncs.gov, and http://tsp.ncs.gov.
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