In November 2012, an unexpected event occurred in NYC. A hurricane rolled in and upended the lives of many for weeks on end. Help came eventually, but many were left to take care of themselves, especially in the first week. Among the infrastructure that took a beating was the extensive wired and wireless networks around New York. Some neighborhoods lost all forms of Internet and mobile connectivity. Red Hook was one of these neighborhoods.
Among the serious problems facing residents was a lack of heat, water, and electricity from the night before the storm all the way through Thanksgiving. Not having electricity prevented residents from communicating with the outside world, further inconveniencing them, and in some cases, endangering lives. In the case of Red Hook, one of the mitigating structures had been in place months before, and that is what made it effective in what is now framed as a win amidst a serious humanitarian disaster. This structure was a small set of Wifi nodes put in place through the cooperation of Red Hook Initiative and the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.
When the storm hit, a combination of factors allowed for these nodes to provide connectivity to residents: first, Red Hook Initiative sits at the edge of the neighborhood, near the BQE; relatively far away from the bay, and thus the most serious flooding in the neighborhood. Perhaps for this reason, the electricity stayed up and left its Internet service intact. Second, the Wifi nodes themselves were already in place on the roof, and they stayed up through the storm. The Wifi routers were able to provide connectivity through RHI’s functional electricity and Internet uplink.
About 10 days after Sandy landfall, FEMA and its collaborators became aware of RHI Wifi and offered help to augment the already existing network, by facilitating access to a faster satellite uplink, opening up discussions with city officials, and coordinating the added help of a few volunteers. This decision was predicated on the idea that it’s better to build off of pre-existing efforts. Without the efforts of RHI, OTI, and collaborators months before the storm, there would have been no groundwork from which to build subsequent humanitarian response efforts.
I wrote an article already about some of the events that transpired, but I wanted to write this blog post as a note of clarification following months of introspection about what it means to shape a narrative. It turns out that this piece of infrastructure and the efforts around it have become a bit of an emblematic episode in discussions around coordination between state and non-state actors, and centralized and de-centralized structures. My article described only a small slice of events that took place over the course of three days.
A piece describing the “long-tail” would have read differently and would have put even more of an emphasis on the fact that things “worked” because the groundwork was laid in advance. In the months since, organizations at various international, state and non-state levels have used this episode to demonstrate the value of decentralized infrastructure and new forms of humanitarian aid collaborations, and to push for more capacity in their efforts. This is a wonderful thing to see, but I hope that those using this episode as an example take the time to point out that the seeds were planted long ago, and that non-state actors were at least as much responsible for the positive results we have seen.