‘We’ve Got To Rebuild’: The Channel Steps Up In Aftermath Of Hurricane Helene As Threat Of Hurricane Milton Looms

‘Infrastructure is our biggest problem here right now, for customers, for people personally,’ says Ed Tatsch, owner and president of North Carolina MSP ETS Networks.

More than 10 days after Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast, Ed Tatsch, owner and president of Arden, N.C.-based family-run MSP ETS Networks, could call out through Wi-Fi on his office’s wired internet while his house remained without power and water soaked his basement.

In South Carolina, to get customers internet access, employees of MSP Cyber Solutions would connect cellular hotspots to firewalls in customers’ buildings and even turned to no-contract wireless devices at Walmart for aid.

And in Florida, Kerem Koca, CEO of BlueCloud, No. 483 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500, is already preparing for Hurricane Milton, set to make landfall later this week.

As seen in the aftermath of last year’s Hawaii wildfires, the 2021 Texas winter storm and other recent history-making weather events, solution providers and vendors are showing up for customers and banding together even when their own businesses need to recover from the fallout of a weather disaster.

Even at a time of great technological advancement in artificial intelligence and other areas, the one-two punch of Helene and Milton shows the continued disruptive power of nature.

Helene was the second-deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in 50 years, with a death toll of more than 230 people, according to CNN.

Data analytics firm CoreLogic estimates about $30.5 billion to $47.5 billion in total wind and flood insured and uninsured losses.

Weak Signals In Western North Carolina

Craig Zimmerman, COO of Asheville, N.C.-based Big Cloud Consultants, could get a text out to a CRN reporter on Saturday and Monday, but phone calls would not connect.

Friday night, electrical power returned for Zimmerman, but Saturday’s cellphone signal strength was notably worse.

“There is a story … eight days and still no cell reception,” he said.

For customers trying to reach Zimmerman by email, an automated message kept them updated on the condition of Big Cloud and its team. “Recently, Hurricane Helene came through Western North Carolina and left our area pretty [devastated],” read Monday’s message. “Our staff and families are ok but there is no power or internet in many places and cell service is spotty at best.”

ETS Networks’ Tatsch was one of about 141,000 without power in the North Carolina mountains on Saturday, according to Duke Energy.

Many of ETS’ customers are local businesses, Tatsch said. One ETS customer lost everything, and the rest are without services. Many people fled to Charlotte and Raleigh temporarily. Two main routes into his area “have been cut off completely … entirely washed out,” he said.

“Infrastructure is our biggest problem here right now, for customers, for people personally,” he said. “Mobile communications [are bad]. It’s not their fault. I get that. They don’t expect to have to have generators for every last tower they have for 100 miles.”

Signs of improvement proved fleeting. One customer finally got back online through LTE backup only for it to fail on Monday and the customer locked out of a local server requiring internet-based multifactor authentication, Tatsch said.

“We’ve got to rebuild,” he said. “People have to rebuild the water infrastructure. We’ve got to rebuild electrical infrastructure because there were 200 substations destroyed or partially rendered useless.”

For people looking to donate, Tatsch recommended The Storehouse, a ministry providing food and necessities to Henderson County, N.C., which remained in a state of emergency Monday.

Tatsch said that two companies keeping locals connected in Helene’s aftermath were satellite internet company Starlink, part of SpaceX, and local ISP Skyrunner.

Skyrunner posted to its Facebook page Friday to say that about 50 percent of its infrastructure was back in service, with much of the restored service “running on generators that require constant visits and refueling as we await grid power restoration.”

“Some of our more remote locations may remain without grid power for some time, but we are actively working on solutions, such as increasing fuel storage at our critical sites, to keep services running reliably,” Skyrunner said.

North Carolina’s Polk County and surrounding areas saw “large sections of fiber transport being completely destroyed and, in some areas, simply gone,” with engineering plans under development to work around the missing sections.

“We are optimistic that these critical connections will be restored in the coming days,” according to the post. “We want to thank you all for your patience, understanding, and support as we navigate this situation together. We are committed to the communities we serve, and for us, this effort is personal. We live and work in the same areas impacted by this storm, and we are dedicated to ensuring that everyone gets reconnected as quickly as possible. We’re all in this together, and we will continue to work tirelessly until full service is restored.”

As for Starlink, parent company SpaceX posted on X Sunday that it and T-Mobile received emergency special temporary authority from the U.S. government to enable satellites with direct-to-cell capability for cellphone coverage in areas hit by Helene. X is owned by SpaceX Chairman, CEO and CTO Elon Musk.

“The satellites have already been enabled and started broadcasting emergency alerts to cell phones on all networks in North Carolina,” according to the post. “In addition, we may test basic texting (SMS) capabilities for most cell phones on the T-Mobile network in North Carolina. SpaceX’s direct-to-cell constellation has not been fully deployed, so all services will be delivered on a best-effort basis.”

Starlink also made the first month of service free temporarily for people in areas affected by Helene, according to the vendor’s website. Kit limits were also temporarily increased to 20 per residential account with an option for more for emergency response groups.

In a statement to CRN, distributor TD Synnex, which has a headquarters in Clearwater, Fla., and employees in the Carolinas, said that many workers “were personally impacted from the storm.”

“This week, a number of measures have been undertaken to support those affected co-workers both from the company and from co-workers themselves, including both helping co-workers clean out their damaged homes and donating supplies in the offices for affected co-workers to use,” according to the statement. The distributor “is making donations to Feeding Tampa Bay, United Way of Greenville County’s Hurricane Helene Relief Fund and the American Red Cross to assist with relief efforts and is encouraging our co-workers to support those organizations as well.”

AT&T said in a statement Monday that its FirstNet Response Operations Group “is working around the clock to support public safety’s emergency communications and has liaisons engaged with local and federal agencies.”

The vendor has topped off generators with fuel at cell sites and switch facilities, tested backup batteries at cell sites and staged emergency response and network recovery equipment in strategic locations for quick deployment after Milton, according to the vendor.

On Monday, Verizon said in a statement that its Frontline Crisis Response Team is ready for Milton and that the vendor has staged a fleet of portable network solutions, including satellite-based portable network assets, in case fiber connections are compromised.

Verizon also has mobile generators to assist communities with commercial power loss, and engineers have ensured that batteries, generators and other backup systems are operational and refueled, according to the vendor.

Opening Up Homes In South Carolina

Eric Gurley, founder and CEO of Anderson, S.C.-based Cyber Solutions, told CRN in an interview that for his customers that have power, a huge portion don’t have any internet access.

Because of the popularity of cloud-based services, Cyber Solutions customers without power at their offices could set up remote working if need be. Most of its customers have a large portion of their data in the cloud, especially following the global pandemic.

“Feels almost like we’re back in the COVID era when everybody’s working from home,” Gurley said.

Cyber Solutions, which has about 40 employees, also acted quickly to adjust security settings to accommodate location changes and allow system access by users, he said.

The purchase of the no-contract Walmart devices was so successful, Gurley said, that the MSP is “going to keep those in stock because, just from a value perspective … we can deploy these things in a matter of minutes.”

“We’re going to have those on hand in the future for smaller-scale things,” he said. “It’s a really neat way to be able to put a Band-Aid on the internet for a period of time.”

Gurley said he plans to encourage customers to invest more in cellular backups. Cellular modems were “a lifesaver” for Cyber Solutions customers, especially for municipalities and towns that needed to take emergency phone calls as well as for medical facilities.

“Even the people that were running off generator power, they still had no internet,” he said. “You can tether to your cellphone or whatever, but you can’t easily feed an entire network with your cellphone. … The firewall just fails right over to the cellular device and, for the most part, you don’t even know that it happened.”

In a display of camaraderie at Cyber Solutions, as employees’ power returned, they would invite coworkers to their homes to get connected. “You have got these people sitting around kitchen tables,” Gurley said. “Our customers were very impressed. We were able to really adapt quickly. And as our customers needed us, we were available.”

Helene destroyed one employee’s house. A family member of Gurley’s had two large oak trees on top of their house. As for Gurley himself, the storm downed about 150 trees on his 250-acre farm, and power returned to his home on Saturday. Immediately after Helene, Gurley used an excavator to move cars and trees to unblock the main road from his farm, he said.

“I don't think anybody here or there had any clue of what this was going to be,” he said. “The weather guys were certainly saying that this is going to be like a once in a 1,000-year event, but I don't think anybody really understood what that meant.”

Florida Eyes Next Storm

Koca, CEO of Tampa, Fla.-based BlueCloud, told CRN in an interview that Milton’s current track could make it more devastating to Florida than Helene. He’s hopeful that because of the unexpected seriousness of Helene, more people evacuate the area before Milton lands.

Most of BlueCloud’s customers are Fortune 500 members with some services in the cloud and without data centers in the area. Helene was “a non-event, from that point of view,” Koca said.

“Post-COVID, we are in a different way of living, and I think [our] businesses aren’t affected as much,” by events such as Helene, he said.

In a statement to CRN, Tampa-based AVI-SPL, No. 58 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, said that “while Helene did not impact us, we’re closely monitoring Milton now.”

D&H Distributing, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based distributor that opened a Clearwater, Fla., campus with 200 employees about a year ago, is monitoring Milton, Chief Commercial Officer Marty Bauerlein told CRN in an interview.

“We’ve already told employees to take care of their families,” he said. “We typically are in the office on Tuesdays ... but we've told our people [to not] come in and that their safety is our biggest priority. … We immediately secured hotel rooms in northern Florida for our employees who wanted to leave the area.”

Two inside directors at D&H are also currently assembling people to help employees and others on Thursday or Friday as needed, Bauerlein said.

“If they have a situation like needing help cleaning out their homes or if they’re impacted at all by the storm, we’re going to band together and help our employees out,” he said. “And then over the weekend, we’re also looking potentially at doing some things in the community.”

D&H has redundant systems and backups, Bauerlein said. Channel partners can work directly with the company’s headquarters if needed.

Keith Archibald, CEO of Oldsmar, Fla.-based Ballast Services, told CRN in an interview that the day after Helene, the city smelled like saltwater brought in by the hurricane.

The storm had disparate effects on the area, Archibald noted, with a devastated neighborhood a block from an untouched one. Post-Helene debris remains piled up in the worst-hit areas of Tampa Bay, with emergency services concerned about it proving a hazard for any Milton rescues.

Archibald said he’s seen pictures showing that roads to Georgia are packed with people evacuating.

But despite the property damage to homes, from a business continuity perspective, things went well for Ballast customers, about 60 percent of whom are in Florida and most of them working in the midmarket, Archibald said.

“Most customers have shifted their workloads to the cloud,” he said. “Most companies now have their data centers running in a colo [colocation data center] or in the cloud, and those are pretty bulletproof.”

For customers hit by flooded homes, Ballast stepped up to handle technology needs so that they could focus on personal recovery and damage, Archibald said.

“That’s been a blessing that we’ve been able to help people with” that, he said. “I’m happy to do that.”

Archibald said his home, about 15 miles inland, was unharmed by the storm surge. He attributed Florida’s underground power lines and fiber infrastructure with keeping businesses running after hurricanes.

“We’ve all got generators and portable air conditioners and stuff like that,” he said. We’re prepared for any kind of situation that comes up.”

Operating all of its platforms and systems in Amazon Web Services’ cloud or Software-as-a-Service and no local data center allowed Ballast to keep going after Helene. Archibald gave a shout-out to local organization Tampa Bay Tech for fostering collaboration among local executives and companies to help those especially affected by Helene.

Archibald pointed people looking to donate to charities such as United Way and American Red Cross as well as evangelical Christian disaster relief organization Samaritan’s Purse.

With Milton looming, Archibald and his team have been at work making sure customers with local data centers have good data and server backups in case of power loss or flooding, especially with word that this next hurricane could bring twice as high of a storm surge as Helene.