From Redmond with WiFi: How this Microsoft employee helped bring critical infrastructure to a hurricane-ravaged Caribbean island

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Nicholas Harland was worried about his uncle Roger.

Roger Harland, resident of the smallest of the US Virgin Islands UU., St. John, is taking medications for a recent liver transplant, and during the summer, when Hurricane Irma was approaching, the family could not get in touch. Then his nephew began to devise a plan with his family to get to the island and make sure his uncle had the medication he needed.

Nicholas Harland, a senior manager at Microsoft, encountered an immediate obstacle. St. John lacks its own airport, so the typical method of passage would be to fly to St. Thomas Island and take a ferry. But Irma decimated the St. Thomas airport, forcing Harland to find another path.

So he turned to the Internet and found a group of people on Facebook trying to get supplies for those affected by the hurricane. There he connected with a restaurant owner who cooked and sent them by boat to St. John from St. Croix, an island 45 minutes south that got rid of the worst part of Irma.

"I flew there, and these people I did not know stayed at their house during the night and fed me and gave me an air-conditioned room," Harland said. "And then I got on a boat the next morning and went to St. John."

A little over a week after Irma's coup, Harland met with his uncle and his aunt Fran. It turned out that Roger was well supplied with four months of medication, and Harland brought another two months of courage.

An experienced backpacker, Harland brought everything he needed to survive for a couple of days. He says he wanted to help, not become someone who needs help.

It was then that his mission took on a larger purpose. He had brought with him a $ 7,000 satellite phone and other communication equipment to help Roger and Fran stay connected to the family.

Harland's stash of equipment included 12 Baofeng UV5-R radios, powerful portable hand-held radios, to deliver to friends and neighbors. If they understood, Harland said he was ready to recruit people who could install radio towers to restore some form of communication to the island.

But it turned out that there was a group that was already doing that. After receiving a signal, Harland began asking around to find out who was working to reconnect the island. He connected with a group of local IT professionals working to restore Internet service through a new WiFi network. Although cellular service did not work and the island did not have electricity, the group was able to use an underwater cable that still functioned as the backbone of its network.

They set up the first WiFi hotspot on the island four days after Irma hit, before Harland arrived. They also managed to establish a point-to-point link in a National Park Service office where the first responders of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were stationed and in a few businesses, so customers could use credit cards.

When Harland arrived, he found the equipment in a pizzeria that would serve as his base of operations. Together, they devised a plan to provide Wi-Fi for the entire island.

It was assumed that only Harland would stay a couple of days, help his uncle, leave the equipment he brought and then leave. But the second catastrophic storm that hit the area, Hurricane Maria, disabled the St. Croix airport, leaving it stranded.

Harland eventually got off the island, but three months later, he is still making trips to St. John's from Redmond, Washington, and is back there again between Christmas and New Year's. Every time he has dragged with him thousands of dollars in equipment to strengthen the WiFi network. This effort is the first for Harland, taking his philanthropic donations to a new level of commitment.

"I give to charities, I have payroll deductions, but I was never in a position where I had skills and experience that could really affect an entire community like that," Harland said.

Harland and the local IT guys - Matt Gyuraki, Jason Monigold, Morgan Barlas, Rob Tutton, Pete Miazga - have since founded a non-profit organization called Love City Community Network. The objective is to continue developing a plan to bring WiFi to areas affected by the storm such as St. John and serve as a resource for other groups that want to replicate that effort. Harland recruited a fellow engineer, Majdi Abbas, a former Yahoo engineer, to join the effort, and has since become a critical member of the team.

Harland is now in St. John, his fourth trip there, and possibly the last for a while. This time, you will be setting up more point-to-point equipment to increase the capacity of the network, since it is starting to face bandwidth problems.

And even if he can not return for a while, Harland will continue to participate prominently in the effort. During an interview at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Washington, part of the network was reduced briefly, showing that the work did not end when the network was launched. His office, where he is surrounded by a quartet of monitors and a sign showing Irma's path in September, is a mix of his working life and his growing mission in St. John.

In his department, also in Redmond, Harland has been testing the equipment he brings to St. John. That gives him what he calls "probably one of the fastest WiFi networks."

Harland has always been an internet enthusiast. He got his first job with an Internet service provider at the age of 15, at a time when every small city had a dial-up Internet service provider. He has been with Microsoft for five years and today works at the Global Network Acquisition Group, which plans and manages Microsoft's worldwide data center network. He knows some things about managing a complex network.

Those skills were useful when the group was crouching during Maria. Still without power, the team had to tear down much of the infrastructure it had built due to the risk posed by the second storm. Then they began to develop a plan to present to the government and aid organization in order to obtain funds for their work and the equipment they needed. By building the bones of the new WiFi network, they became analog.

"We took a map, some pins and ropes, and we assembled lines of sight to get point-to-point wireless connections across the island," Harland said.

Once the storm clouds cleared, the team that would become the Love City Community Network went back to work. And so did other residents of the island. That included country music star Kenny Chesney, who has a home on the island that was destroyed by Irma. His charity Love for Love City aimed to identify the most important needs and create an avenue for people to donate money and supplies for the rescue effort.

A friend of Harland's in Boston bought some wireless equipment and sent them to a private plane owned by a hedge fund manager on the island. With the public airports still decimated, that same plane took Harland off the island almost two weeks after his arrival, along with some injured residents.

Rich and isolated, with 70 percent of the island's 20 square miles, an undeveloped national park, the challenges at St. John's were different from those in the dense cities. With only about 5,000 people, a small proportion of the total population of the Virgin Islands, Harland says St. John was not the top priority for the government's response. The team had their knowledge of the island, find the right places in the rugged terrain to put their equipment

At the same time, other organizations in the field were working to make things work again. One was a group called the Global Disaster Immediate Response Team, or Global DIRT. Founded to respond to the massive 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, the organization aims to fill gaps in disaster response and work with government and local organizations involved in the recovery.

In the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, the organization has been working to get the communications back online. Zac Clancy, IT director at Global DIRT, told GeekWire that the locals at St. John's have made a huge difference in recovery, doing everything from putting communications back online to preparing meals, just walking around and asking the people what do they need?


As the Internet and smartphones have proliferated around the world, recovering the network has become almost as important as regaining power, and that is why it is among the top priorities of Global DIRT on the ground.

"When you have these larger bodies arriving, like your Navy, your Coast Guard, if you do not have any established communications infrastructure, or if there is not a way to communicate anyway, things become very complicated." Clancy said.

The first thing that the Global DIRT team did when they arrived in St. John was to distribute a lot of satellite phones. And the large volume of equipment downed by Harland, the local IT professionals on the island and other volunteers accelerated things. One of the local IT guys, Gyuraki, extrapolated what they did in St. John and installed a WiFi network working with Google, Facebook and the non-profit organization NetHope to establish an "air fiber" connection that connects cell towers in a square of 19 island of Puerto Rico.

Despite all this work, much remains to be done. It took almost two months for the first buildings to regain power in St. John, and the Harland team estimates that still only 60 percent of the houses on the island have electricity. In Puerto Rico, devastated by Hurricane Maria, many remain without power.

Beyond the efforts of residents, aid organizations and government agencies, technology companies have stepped up to help the recovery mission. Tesla, Facebook, Google and many more worked immediately after the storms to restore power and connectivity to the regions.

Microsoft has launched donations and technology. He gave $ 1 million for disaster relief immediately after, and until November he had donated more than $ 5 million.

Microsoft is partnering with NetHope and support organizations to provide connectivity through TV white space technology. This involves taking advantage of the unused blocks of transmission spectrum between television channels to offer wireless broadband connections over long distances and difficult terrain.

The efforts of these technology companies have greatly helped the recovery, said Clancy of Global DIRT. What is most helpful in terms of long-term recovery is labor. Getting talented engineers to solve problems is a key part of restoring connections and maintaining their operation. A long-term presence beyond the initial impact of the storm facilitates the maintenance and management of the new systems created during the recovery.

"It's hard to get a perspective for a shorter period of time," Clancy said. "One of the reasons why we are so effective is because we are here for months, and we will arrive here months later, because we have been here for so long and because we anticipate being here for so long, making decisions about how we do Things get a little easier because we do not necessarily feel a crisis for time and we do not necessarily feel that we need to make the most impact in a couple of days and we hope it goes well. "

Beyond the effort at St. John, Harland hopes that the Love City team group can help provide a model for reconnecting communities after a disaster. Harland said initial recovery efforts by nongovernmental organizations often do not focus on starting businesses so that the economy can accelerate again.

That was a big part of his work at St. John.

"When you lose your communication circuits and all your power, all the banks close and you can not use an ATM, and the stores can not process the payment cards, then the whole economy turned into cash and what we gave ourselves. The account was that people can not get more cash because the banks are closed and the ferries were not working, "said Harland. "We implemented WiFi in the grocery store, the hardware and a pharmacy so they could re-run the credit cards."