FCC Officials Get Firsthand Tour On Radio Recovery From Helene.

Seventeen radio stations remain off the air in four states in the Southeast from Hurricane Helene as of Monday morning (Oct. 7), more than a week after the storm. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel is back from a visit to Asheville, NC — including a stop at a local radio station — and says the terrain has made recovery in the region more difficult.

“The area where Helene left her mark was especially broad and includes mountainous communities like those in western North Carolina that do not regularly see these kinds of storms,” she said. “This terrain makes communication more challenging, with many wireless towers in areas that are high up and hard to reach, often because the roads to them have been blocked by debris and decimated by flooding.”

During the visit to Asheville on Friday, Rosenworcel visited a local radio station. She also met with officials at the Buncombe County, NC emergency operations center and received updates from the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau deployed to North Carolina to support communications recovery efforts.

“When disaster strikes, the FCC will always have boots on the ground. We collect outage data, conduct spectrum surveys to understand the state of coverage, determine the impact on radio and television, and assess capabilities for emergency services,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. Her trip also took her to a local library serving as a community Wi-Fi hub, and she saw first-hand how wireless carriers are using light truck locations to restore service in the impacted areas. “In any crisis, communication is a lifeline. We must use this storm to understand ways we can make this infrastructure more resilient and more accessible in the future,” Rosenworcel said.

Commissioner Brendan Carr was also in the region, traveling to an Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh, NC to meet with emergency management and public safety officials as well as telecom providers that are coordinating the disaster response and efforts to restore communications services in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

“The loss of life and destruction is heartbreaking, and there is a very long road ahead for so many families and communities. Ensuring the quick restoration of communications services remains a top priority for government agencies,” Carr said.

In an update, the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau says it has been working with officials from other federal agencies and state emergency management workers across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. For radio, the FCC has been distributing multilingual PSAs containing emergency communications tips to broadcasters in the path of Hurricane Helene. It has also been working closely with other industries, with an emphasis on wireless providers who become even more critical during disasters. Across the five-state region, the FCC says just 4% of cell phone tower sites are out of service as of Monday, with the hardest-hit region remaining western North Carolina.