{"id":98486,"date":"2025-12-29T07:51:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T07:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/98486\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T07:51:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T07:51:09","slug":"strengthening-communication-when-it-matters-most","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/98486\/","title":{"rendered":"Strengthening communication when it matters most"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A Lee County communications tower. -LEE COUNTY PUBLIC SAFETY \/ COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n

Lee County officials are prioritizing public safety with a new project. Plans are now in place to design and build new resilient communication towers that will greatly improve post-storm recovery efforts in the future.\n<\/p>\n

The Lee Board of County Commissioners recently voted to award a $1.18 million contract to Motorola Solutions to begin work on the new public safety infrastructure. This project will facilitate engineering, permitting, and construction across five county-owned communication sites. The locations are in Alva, North Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres, southeast of Fort Myers and southwest of Fort Myers.\n<\/p>\n

Ben Abes, Lee County public safety director, says the new communication towers will be critical during and after storms, when every minute counts.\n<\/p>\n

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A Lee County communications tower. -LEE COUNTY PUBLIC SAFETY \/ COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n

\u201cIt provides the critical communications, not only for our first responders, but also the community,\u201d Abes said. \u201cIt improves the time in that first very early phase of response and recovery after a storm and really improves our ability to be more nimble by allowing responders and citizens the ability to communicate easier.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Ian, communication across Lee County was essentially shut down in many ways. Abes says only one tower physically fell (in downtown Boca Grande), but almost every communication tower in Lee County was impacted in some way. The county leases many towers, which led to additional challenges.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cAt these leased facilities, we don\u2019t have the visibility on all of the infrastructure,\u201d Abes said. \u201cWe just have the visibility that that site has gone down. Imagine, for instance, the tower is still standing after the storm, everything is still connected, all of the systems are operational, but the generator doesn\u2019t have fuel. Or maybe there\u2019s a communications cable that is cut outside, and it takes us physically going out there to find that the communications cable has been cut.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Abes explains that most communication towers not only handle first responder communication, but cell phone traffic for the public as well. If the towers are taken offline or damaged in some way due to a storm, clear and consistent communication for everyone is at risk in a time when people need it the most.\n<\/p>\n

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A communication tower crashes into a building in Boca Grade due to Hurricane Ian. -BRET KUEBER \/ COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to find ways not only to help our first responders, but through this project, we can also ensure that the community has access to that same level of communications redundancy,\u201d Abes said. \u201cI was out on Fort Myers Beach right after Hurricane Ian. And it was really difficult to communicate on cell phones.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Calen Ambrioso of Cape Coral experienced this first-hand. It was almost a month before his cell phone service was fully restored after Hurricane Ian pummeled most of Southwest Florida.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI lost (cell service) late in the night Wednesday night and didn\u2019t get it back for like three weeks or so,\u201d said Ambrioso. \u201cI\u2019d have service for a quick second here and there but not long enough to make a call or do anything important. So, I went down to the beach every day and helped with clean up and just waited until I got service again.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Ambrioso\u2019s story is not uncommon. People all over Southwest Florida were unable to connect with family, friends, and loved ones during and after the storm. This caused confusion and concern among families who didn\u2019t know if their loved ones survived the impacts of the Category 4 landfall. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that Hurricane Ian was responsible for at least 156 direct and indirect deaths in Florida.\n<\/p>\n

Dr. Jennifer Fulwider, a faculty member at Florida Gulf Coast University, was unreachable for almost three days after Hurricane Ian flooded her Fort Myers neighborhood. She was without power or cell phone service. She said it sent both her out-of-state family and her FGCU colleagues into a panic, not knowing if she was okay or not.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Dean (at FGCU) actually sent two people to my neighborhood looking for me,\u201d said Fulwider. \u201cMy husband had to drive about five miles away to get a signal and let people know via social media that we were safe.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

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A communication tower collapses into downtown Boca Grade in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. -KONO WENDEL \/ COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n

According to a report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 36.8% of cell phone towers were down in Lee County immediately after Hurricane Ian. Lee County had the most towers offline in the entire state of Florida during that time.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing for first responders not to be able to communicate, but those towers are handling text messages from families to loved ones out of state, people trying to communicate with FEMA or other response agencies to submit insurance claims,\u201d said Abes. \u201cSo having resilient communications after a catastrophic disaster like that is critically important.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

So important, in fact, that Lee County officials took on the long and work-intensive process to apply for federal funding to make sure these communication issues don\u2019t happen again. Officials were able to obtain the entire $1.18 million amount through the Community Development Block Grant \u2013 Disaster Recovery. These grant funds are appropriated by Congress and allocated by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to help rebuild disaster-impacted areas across the U.S.\n<\/p>\n

The current resilient communication towers project is part of the larger ResilientLee Recovery & Resilience Plan. The plan serves as a roadmap to long-term recovery for Lee County after the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian. More than 6,000 stakeholders provided input to the plan.\n<\/p>\n

Abes says he plans to use the ResilientLee Recovery & Resilience Plan as a guide to continue to improve public safety in Lee County.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s important to recognize,\u201d Abes said. \u201cI mean (the plan) was 14 months of work that thousands of people across the community put into. (We will) continue to go back to that plan and find gaps and areas where we can improve and go after grants and projects like this to be able to make more improvements.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

As part of its new contract with Lee County, Motorola Solutions will install the new resilient communication towers to replace the current ones. They will be built within a half mile of the current tower sites to ensure that communications coverage remains consistent. Abes says Motorola will engineer everything so they can unplug all of the equipment, move it to the new site, and plug it all back in and be operational in a seamless and quick process.\n<\/p>\n

The installation process is expected to take less than a day. Emergency response communications will not be interrupted, so at no point are 911 or other emergency communication systems expected to be offline for any part of Lee County during the tower replacement.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s built in such a way that even if one tower goes down, there are other towers that help cover that area,\u201d said Abes. \u201cSo that if we did have a catastrophic failure, let\u2019s say you have a lightning strike or a fire at a tower site, there\u2019s other towers that can cover that area so that there\u2019s never a gap in communication.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Abes expects the new communications towers in Lee County to go live by 2027.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Lee County communications tower. -LEE COUNTY PUBLIC SAFETY \/ COURTESY PHOTO Lee County officials are prioritizing public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":{"0":"post-98486","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cape-coral","8":"tag-cape-coral","9":"tag-cape-coral-headlines","10":"tag-cape-coral-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}