Your Coastside Community Coming together
Our goal is to improve coast side community communication resilience.
No Internet. No TV. No Phone.
NO 911, Now what?
The Coastside communication infrastructure that serves the communities surrounding Half Moon Bay is currently facing a range of challenges that urgently require attention. This report aims to bring these issues to the attention of the public and elected officials, highlighting the impact on reliability and accessibility of critical infrastructure, such as internet connectivity, mobile network coverage, and emergency communication systems. Degraded communication service and prolonged outages on the Coastside have existed for a number of years, but were punctuated by the severity of the recent storm damages. In particular, this report focuses on the recent severe storms that affected California in December, 2022 and January 2023, which caused prolonged power and communications outages of up to 240+ hours. These outages significantly impacted the ability of residents and first responders to communicate with emergency services, and with their families.
During this period, falling trees destroyed power and telecommunication lines, resulting in extensive outages, including the complete loss of communication due to the lack of resilience of the communication systems in the area. Moreover, the entire Coastside was disconnected from Xfinity’s services twice in one week, causing significant disruptions in areas where home fiber or analog telephone services were not available. These outages are not isolated incidents, and residents in rural areas of San Mateo County regularly experience extremely slow internet services and poor cellular coverage, leading to even longer power and communication outages.
The largest age group in the Coastside, according to The United States Census Bureau, is between 50-64 years old. The second-largest group is individuals who are 65 years and above. The CDC reports that in the United States in 2019, individuals aged between 50-64 had 4.8 times higher chances of experiencing a heart attack compared to individuals aged between 35-49. Additionally, people over the age of 65 had 11.3 times higher chances of experiencing a heart attack than the 35-49yr baseline. During the same period, 22% of individuals who were 18 years or older required emergency room visits. Such emergencies require quick response times and effective communication, and having access to life-saving emergency services for both medical and non-medical emergencies can be the difference between life and death for anyone.
Read the full report to learn more.
