Hurricane Irene has caused some disruption so far to local communications systems, and the FCC is keeping a close eye on phone and TV service as the storm makes its way up the East Coast.

The agency’s teams in the field have recorded some outages to landline service, affecting perhaps 12,000 customers, mostly in North Carolina. About 130 wireless sites are also down, with about 215 sites on backup power, all near the hurricane’s landfall point.

About 5,000 cable customers are without service, according to the FCC, which relayed the numbers to reporters Saturday after surveying the spectrum landscape at about noon.

911 call centers and other public safety systems seem to be intact, officials said.

“As Hurricane Irene makes landfall, we at the FCC are continuing to monitor the situation very closely,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Saturday. “We’ve deployed our emergency response team and our 24-hour operations center to protect people’s ability to communicate.”

Some damage to communications systems is to be expected in any large storm. But Irene is the second stress test of the nation’s communication infrastructure in a week, coming just days after a rare earthquake on the East Coast disrupted cellphone service for hours.

In the days before the hurricane’s landfall, the FCC began coordinating with FEMA and other federal agencies to keep tabs on wireless, wireline and radio service. It has deployed four teams to scan airwaves for outages during the storm and activated an emergency reporting system for providers.

“We have been in touch with our federal partners and with private sector communications providers very intensely for the last few days, including today,” Genachowski said, “and have communicated at all levels very clearly that we expect the communications carriers to do everything humanly possible to respond to this hurricane.”

Retired Rear Adm. Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC’s Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau, told reporters he is “satisfied” the carriers are “executing the hurricane prep plans we’ve asked them to have.”

“We want to make sure they’re ready … to get things back up as quickly as possible” in the event of outages, Barnett said, adding that “there’s always more to be done.”

In the meantime, the FCC is urging people to “limit nonemergency phone calls” to ease the network congestion that made communication difficult after the earthquake. The agency also suggested texting or emailing, which are more likely to get through during high-volume periods.

On a broader scale, the FCC stressed its commitment to a new nationwide data network for first responders, as well as a next-generation 911 system that would allow people to use text messages and other services to reach help.

(Source: Politico)