National Security Weakness Exposed in Duluth

A steam pipe broke on the east end of Duluth yesterday morning, January 26, cutting communication services to Northeast Minnesota, said KQDS Fox Channel 21 News at 9 PM. Communications of all kinds were cut for about 12 hours to all of Lake and Cook counties, and the eastern half of St. Louis County where Duluth is. No 911 emergency service, no cell phone service, and no internet service was available from 10:15 AM until 10:20 PM.

Surprisingly, our local 226 exchange from Silver Bay was in service, and we could watch DirecTV, which requires a land line phone connection. There was no public emergency activated by local TV stations in Duluth until 8:45 PM.

We could have called the fire station in Silver Bay, but how would we have known to do so in an emergency? Residents of the Finland area could not make a phone call to their fire station. What would Finland residents do if a personal emergency prevented them from going to the fire station?

What would anyone do in an emergency on Highway 61, where cell phone coverage is poor in the best of times? Yesterday, it was a 165 mile corridor from Duluth to the Canadian border with no emergency coverage. That's a national security and a homeland security threat.

Why is there no alternative communications channel or a bypass around a known central weakness in Duluth? Plenty of funds have been allocated to Homeland Security to patrol that corridor from Duluth to Thunder Bay, which leaves no doubt that this is a National Security issue.

As it was, emergency services performed well in Lake County. A friend who manages emergency response of all kinds in the county was driven by another friend from Silver Bay to the county offices in Two Harbors. Other friends who are EMT's went to their assigned posts at fire stations in Silver Bay and Finland. Still, until yesterday, who would have known to go to the fire station for help?

Another security weakness was exposed in the lack of local TV coverage of the emergency. I had concluded last year that it was a political and business decision by the Duluth Chamber of Commerce not to provide digital TV access beyond 40 miles of Duluth, and no service to most of Lake and Cook counties. The standard political, business line was, that if it didn't rent a hotel room or sell a meal in Duluth, then there would be no coverage beyond Duluth.

That was particularly evident in ABC local channel 10 WDIO TV in Duluth. Either the misinformation was deliberate, or no effort was made to report the nature of the emergency. While channel 21 had given a plausible explanation, and emergency information, the alert was not issued until 8:45 PM. Channel 10 said the communication problem was sporadic, and the problem was in Ely, not Duluth.

I made one more check of our Verizon National Access broadband internet service at 10:20 PM, after turning off the poor reporting by WDIO TV. Service had been restored, and the Verizon signal was the strongest I've seen. Whatever the fix was, I hope they keep that level of high speed internet service. I had been checking hourly throughout the day, because internet service is that important to our business.