Verizon Simulates Disaster Near Operations Center
It was only a drill, but Verizon Communications' emergency response team brought in its serious equipment for a hazardous materials test in Cockeysville, Maryland, Monday and Tuesday.
Tue, April 05, 2011
IDG News Service — It was only a drill, but Verizon Communications (VZ)' emergency response team brought in its serious equipment for a hazardous materials test in Cockeysville, Maryland, Monday and Tuesday.
In the scenario, a truck carrying chlorine collided with a light-rail train within a few hundred yards of Verizon's Cockeysville operations center, which provides nationwide customer support for the company's enterprise and federal government customers, dispatches field technicians to Verizon customers in the Baltimore area, and houses support staff for Verizon.
In a real disaster, all 791 employees of the Verizon facility would have to evacuate their building, with the Verizon Major Emergency Response Incident Team's (MERIT's) mobile command center, a 51-foot truck trailer, restoring communications at the site. The three-room command center includes 11 workstations, a conference room and a communications center.
The command center, primarily used by Verizon to restore its communications services during a disaster, features a 40-kilowatt generator, four UHF radios, two VHF radios, three DirecTV receivers, a weather station, an amateur radio, a video recorder, two video streaming devices, four computer servers, four satellite modems, two emergency communications scanners and three network switches.
That's just a partial list of the trailer's features. The trailer is a "completely autonomous unit," said David Hyde, disaster recovery team lead for Verizon.
When Verizon arrives at a disaster site, it wants to avoid taxing the local infrastructure, said Dick Price, chief business continuity officer at Verizon. Thus, the trailer has a generator and several communications systems, he said.
While the mission of the command center trailer is primarily to restore Verizon networks, it also can provide Internet and radio communications for local emergency response agencies, Price said. The trailer also has electrical outlets on its exterior so emergency response workers and other people can recharge their laptops and other equipment, and Verizon is working on a way for the trailer to become a cellular transmission site, he added.
"We want to give back to the community as much as we can while we're out there fixing our network," Price said.
In addition to the mobile command center, Verizon has three other trailers outfitted with communications equipment specifically focused on providing Internet and voice service to people affected by disasters. Verizon, which has operated a disaster team since 1993, deployed one of those trailers to Baghdad in 2003, just after the start of the Iraq war, providing soldiers a link to their families in the U.S.
Outside of the mobile command center Tuesday morning, MERIT members were putting on hazmat suits. The mission of the first hazmat team was to enter the Verizon building and test for chlorine and hydrochloric acid inside the Verizon operations center.
