With extreme weather events increasingly common as a result of climate change, coordinating disaster response is an unfortunately ubiquitous challenge for relief organisations. Communications are of course essential for this, and organisations such as Télécoms Sans Frontières ensure that connectivity is made available as soon as possible in the aftermath of disasters.
We spoke to Sébastien Gillet, an ICT Specialist at Télécoms Sans Frontières, to discuss how disaster response has changed as connectivity has become more ingrained into our societies.
Could you tell us about when Télécoms Sans Frontières was founded, and your mission?
Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) is a French NGO created 25 years ago. I joined three years ago in the technical team. The core of the NGO is to provide new technologies in case of emergencies and for humanitarian purposes, initially to assist the affected populations to reconnect with their loved ones, but also we try to provide connectivity for the general coordination of the relief efforts.
I'm part of the technical team, so when I'm not deployed, I'm in charge of maintaining, testing the new technologies and all the tools and assets we have. And when an emergency arrives, I'm going on the field with this equipment to operate [it]. I joined three years ago. Before that, I was a field engineer for a big Swedish mobile vendor, and I was mostly involved in deployment for LTE. So yeah, doing technology on the field with my boots in the mud is something I'm used to.
You’ve just come back from the Caribbean, dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl?
I was in Grenada, my colleague was in Jamaica, but the mission was in these two countries.
Why is communication so important in a crisis? Amidst the destruction and displacement, why is it so important to get communications networks up and running as soon as possible?
It's important for two aspects. The first one is for affected people, so they can just call their loved ones, their relatives, their families, to tell them “I'm safe”, or for the people who are abroad to try to join the affected people who are still on the island, to make sure that they are safe. It's a huge psychological relief for the affected populations and all their relatives and loved ones, but also in the time of crisis, when you need to mobilise the supplies and organise everything, if you don't have the communication, you have nothing. You are left alone on the ground with all your boxes. You don't know where to send them. You don't know what to put into them. You don't know how many you need to send.
So really, coordination without telecommunications is no-go. So this is why we always try to provide first to the coordination centres to make sure that they can organise the relief effort, and next to that, we try to propose a service to the population. We are quite unique in that aspect, because many organisations focus on the coordination, because this is where you have the most visibility, the most impact. But we know by experience that for the people, it's really important for them to get the connectivity at home.
In the wake of these kind of disasters, how badly is infrastructure affected?
You have two issues. You have the telecommunication networks, and you have the power infrastructure as well. Even if your towers can survive the wind, and they are designed to do that, if you don't have the electricity behind to power them, then you don't have network. In recent years, infrastructure is getting more resilient - especially since LTE/4G has been deployed in most countries, they recover faster than before. Which makes sense, because this is a business for the operators. They even sometimes pre-position staff before the hurricane strikes so they are sure that the teams are already on site. As soon as it can be restored, it’s back.
Some of the networks are getting more resilient if they have the power behind, because they can’t fix both at the same time, it’s not the same things, not the same skills, not the same supplies you need. So even if you don't have an electricity grid, which was the case on Grenada where I was - the electricity grid for the whole island is badly damaged, it’s destroyed for at least [the next three months]. Every time you wanted to bring a tower back on air, back into service, you need to bring a generator there to the tower, and every other day you need to bring fuel to that generator.
You can do that on the small island where I was because there were a dozen towers. It's still a burden, but it can be managed. But if you are in other regions, like in Southeast Asia for instance, where typhoons can get much bigger and affect much wider areas at the same time, you have issues to reach the towers, because everything is destroyed and flooded, and then you have many more towers to restore, and then it's a nightmare. So we try to not rely too much on this infrastructure, on LTE, we bring what we need to use it just in case it's available, because it's so much easier for everyone. But we try to be self-sufficient, autonomous in terms of backhaul.
Having a stable power supply is an issue in a lot of emerging markets outside of the context of a disaster - do you collaborate with grid providers? How are you able to address this issue in within a crisis?
To put them back on the grid first, you need to have a grid before, which is not always the case, but we try to collaborate to with other actors - typically logistics actors - who are providing power for the rest of the humanitarian community, because it's not only for us. Everybody needs power at these times. For instance, when we collaborate with the United Nations teams or other regional agencies, they have their own partners who are in charge of bringing the big generators and put the fuel into it, and we rely on them for the power when it's available. If it's not, it happens that sometimes we need to find our own generator on the local market and buy some fuel and bring it with us.
It depends on the kind of mission and operations we have, but if we have mobile operations, we take VSAT and some Wi Fi in a car, and we go from village to village, and we use the car to power everything. We bring some inverters, we connect from the battery of the car, and then we provide a network for an hour or two in the village, and then we go to the next one. If you have a vehicle and enough fuel you can use that for the power as well.
There are solar options, but solar has two issues - the first one is the night, and the second one is energy storage. If you want to store [energy] to take into account cloudy days etc, you need to have batteries. Batteries are very heavy, very bulky, very hard to find locally, and super complicated to fly with. If you want to put that into a commercial plane, you are very limited in capacity, and so we don't really explore these options yet. We mostly rely on existing generators, existing grids. Sometimes there are existing solar systems, and we are glad to use them, but we don't bring them on our own. We really try to remain focused on our specific area, which is technology.
Using a solar or renewable power supply sounds like an ideal way to address this issue. Is battery storage a factor that prevents using renewables?
On paper you don't see the weight of the batteries. Once you need to carry one, you realize why not everyone has a dozen of them out the back.
You mentioned that it has a psychological aspect to the sense of relief, but so much of our lives now depends on having access to connectivity. Given the importance of restoring connectivity in the wake of a disaster – is access to communications increasingly viewed as a human right?
I don’t think that any country has put that into their constitution as a basic right for everyone… I think Bolivia had something about that, I’m not sure about that, but everything depends on communications these days, and it goes even into areas that we don't suspect. If you think about banking systems - if you don't have telecoms, the banks are disconnected.
People cannot access their cash that they have on their bank account, so it completely distresses the local economy. Even for people who would have some money on an account, they can't access it in times of a disaster. If we provide internet, then people can use apps to exchange credit or money. We don't directly plug into the banking systems, of course, for security reasons, but we see that if we provide internet connectivity for the people, they will find a way to use it.
We relied for a long time on SAT phones [for] just calls: we proposed that people call their relatives. Now we realize that is not what people expect anymore - people want to use Facebook or WhatsApp, and we realize that what people need these days is Internet protocols for the messaging, for Facebook, for access to information. This is why we are shifting our activities from HCO (humanitarian calling operations) to more providing a Wi Fi network, which comes with some challenges we need to adapt to the new realities, but it's a natural evolution for our activities.
In the aftermath of a disaster, it’s fair to assume that only a basic level of connectivity is restored - so how sophisticated are the demands that are now placed on this? Is it accurate to say that you're only providing a very basic level?
We provide something which is quite basic, and the limits usually comes from the uplink that we use - if you are on VSAT, then you will have latency, you will have limited throughput, and so you can't really do full HD streaming calls, but people can get used to that. I mean, once you explain that it's a satellite, it takes a long time, it's not like if they were connected to fibre optics.
People are so in need of connectivity that they will adapt to whatever we propose. Sometimes it's the tools that they want to use which are too limited. For instance, the big meeting platforms, like Microsoft Teams, these have not been designed for slow links, low throughput, so when we provide connectivity for coordination, it's not like they expect the same level as in their office in a western country, they realize that that's not how it works in the field.
You can reach anywhere in the world via satellite connectivity with the right equipment - is low Earth orbit technology becoming prevalent is in your mission?
These new technologies, they are changing the game a bit, including for us, because back in the day, there were not that many people who could afford an expensive VSAT terminal to go in the field and provide connectivity. If we were going to the main coordination centre, we could expect that they would not have connectivity.
These days, they managed to get some cheaper terminals from LEO, and so there is less demand for us on the coordination side, but it doesn't mean that we have less [to do] - for instance, in Grenada for Hurricane Beryl, we ended up going to help the affected population because they didn't have anything at all. We went to the last patch of the island, which didn't have any phone coverage from connectivity, and we use our systems that we planned to use for coordination, but we could use it for population. We adapt to everything.
There is still a demand for connectivity. It's just that we need to shift our regular beneficiaries. The history of TSF, we started [by helping] to cover the affected populations, then we moved to coordination to have a bigger impact because this is where the need was. Now we realise that others can fill that gap, and we can spread again between cognition and population, because on the population side, we will always find needs, especially after a disaster.
It's our reflex to first make sure that coordination has what they need - this is the primary need, because these people help the affected population, so if we want as much impact as we can, we first make sure that the coordination takes place - it means that we can also focus on the underserved groups of populations, especially in the areas which are a bit further away from the main roads, or where they don't receive as much help as the others. This is also the advantage of TSF - we are a very small NGO, we are very dynamic, we are quite independent and autonomous, so we go there by our own means. We present ourselves at the coordination centre, and if we realise that they have what they need, then we can freely move away. We don't have a big logistic chain behind us, which would hold us back to the biggest city centres.
Can you go into a bit more detail about your recent time in Grenada and the relief effort following Hurricane Beryl?
This mission the Caribbean was interesting because last year and the year before, we had a capacity building project in the same region with the CDEMA - Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency - which is a multinational agency to manage disasters in the Caribbean. It goes all the way from Haiti to Suriname and Guyana, [mostly] English-speaking countries so not Dominican Republic.
We met them last year; the year before, we did two training sessions there. I was a trainer there, so I met the people, I had a lot of contacts, and it helped me a lot this time, because I knew where to go, and I knew who to ask and who to meet. For instance, when we had to deploy, we first went to Barbados, which was the first airport in the area to reopen and resume their operations, but it is also where the CDEMA HQ is.
I went directly to them, and we managed to ‘fast track’ our integration into their teams. We were sent to Grenada and we realized that actually the coordination, the relief effort, happened [already] so we could go to the local population. But it was much easier and much faster, because I had this contact, because I met these people before, because they knew us. It’s strategic for us to make new partnerships with local actors. It's more and more complex and complicated to come from Europe or from the US into a random country and just expect to go anywhere without asking anyone.
It's the context has changed, and we need find local partners to be able to integrate into a local response, to be more efficient, because otherwise everybody comes and they do what they want in their corner, it's completely uncoordinated. We strongly believe that this kind of partnership that we have with the CDEMA - we have the same in the Asia with the AHA Center, which does the same in Southeast Asia - but this time was in Caribbean. I was very interested to go there and to see how well these partnerships that we started to create with them would be beneficial for our operations. And it worked because I knew directly where to go, and they knew where to send me. We want 3-5 days to reach the most affected areas on time.
Most of the time we are amongst the first ones in the area, which is great because we arrived just before the coordination takes place, so when the coordination really starts, we’ve already provided connectivity, and they can start immediately. But it works even better if we train the local people that are the goal of the capacity building project. We brought them equipment, donated them VSAT terminals, the same as we use, and we take a few days to train them based on our experience. So we could deploy this time for Beryl without too much equipment, because we knew that CDEMA already had some there - we brought it last year.
