Emergency Communications Month – Maintaining Communications During Extreme Weather Events

As part of Emergency Communications Month, WaterISAC is sharing a CISA “Emergency Communications and Extreme Weather Factsheet,” to help water and wastewater utilites enhance their communication resilience and prepare for potential outages during extreme weather events.

Municipalities across the country are experiencing extreme weather events with more frequency. These weather events can knock out traditional communications, necessitating that stakeholders prepare alternative/emergency communications channels to help maintain operations during an emergency. CISA’s factsheet aims to familiarize practitioners with the impacts of extreme weather on emergency communications. Some weather events may also produce multiple kinds of extreme conditions, resulting in compounding and concurrent communications concerns. Accordingly, this resource provides information on re-establishing communications during weather disasters, describes potential communication impacts during various weather events, offers weather response tools, and guidance on improving response efforts during communication outages. Access the full fact sheet at CISA.

Throughout Emergency Communications Month, CISA encourages critical infrastructure organizations, state, local, tribal, and territorial government, and others to significantly bolster communications resilience and emergency preparedness by enrolling in free priority telecommunications services. These services, which include the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS), enable essential personnel to communicate when networks are degraded or congested due to weather events, mass gatherings, cyber incidents, or events stemming from human error. Read more about Emergency Communications Month at CISA.