My name is Ross Wood. I’m the mayor of Grove Hill. Most mayors don’t have the learning curve that I had. Four days before being sworn in, Hurricane Zeta hit. It had been 20 years almost since the last hurricane. There was no manual in town hall for what to do. Luckily, we have a great EMA director. Hurricanes teach you a lot in a very short amount of time.
Hurricane Zeta came along. We had a tremendous amount of damages in the county, especially to our public side with trees and power lines down throughout the county. During that time, we lost our connectivity with our state emergency management agency, and that’s how we request the resources for the county… resources such as MREs, tarps, water, generators. So we lost that connectivity, that ability to reach directly out to them via the internet and request those resources and also to request resources from our surrounding counties, which are partners with us.
Luckily, we had been approached by Uniti Fiber a week prior to the storm about getting service at town hall. So we had that relationship and then when the storm came and all of the internet in town was knocked out, I received a call asking about bringing their emergency operations trailer in.
So behind me is our JOC, our joint operations center. It’s basically a mobile command center. We can take this thing anywhere on our network. As long as we’ve got a splice point, we can drop a cable out, splice it in and get it on the network up and running and give communications to the trailer and whoever needs it. We dropped it in Grove Hill. We worked with the mayor and the police department, and they gave us some prime real estate right outside of the courthouse on The Square.
The trailer was coming from out of Mobile County. Our police met it in the neighboring town and brought it into town with a police escort. So when it turned in off the highway coming towards the courthouse, you heard the sirens and you saw the lights and it was like one of those elation moment things thinking, all right, well that’s a step in the right direction for Grove Hill and for the county. It was definitely a turning point to something good. I have no doubt about that.
So when we got to Grove Hill, we were looking immediately for which networks were still up or operational or even remotely close to being viable. And as we were digging through looking for that needle in a haystack, we found the bank across the street. The power companies restored power to that bottom half of Grove Hill. The bank came on, the lights came on, and it was like a light coming on for us because we actually serviced the bank across the way, and using the network that we had that was supporting them, we just tied right in and we were off to the races.
We actually ran, I mean, a Cat 5 straight through the parking lot over to the EMA building, got them up and operational. As soon as they were back online, their 911 call center was back online, we took the extra capacity and we extended a public wifi outside of the trailer. So anyone that needed to get access to the internet to check the weather or anything else for the hurricane, they had that available to them.
It was really cool to be a part of the team that brought connectivity back to a community devastated by the hurricane.
As always, this was a learning experience for us. As we deploy this moving forward, we’ll learn and make this thing the most versatile piece of equipment in our arsenal.
Uniti Fiber’s connectivity with our stadium allowed us the ability to request the resources that our citizens need to take care of themselves and their family… the water, the MREs, the tarps… but also gave us the ability to make sure that every citizen in this county had the ability to vote on election day.
It wasn’t just about one small town of 2,500 people and the need for Uniti Fiber. It was about a town, a county, and an area. There were a lot of new things to be learned, and that joint operation center being here really helped facilitate those needs without a doubt.
*The testimonial transcript has been edited from the original video content to provide an improved reading experience.
