On September 19, 2018 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and devastated the island causing almost $92B in damage and killing over 60 people. Power and communications infrastructure was essentially wiped out across most of the island when the largely aerial plant was destroyed.

The ensuing power outage became the longest in US history lasting 5-6 months in many places. FEMA spent more on disaster relief in Puerto Rico than for any natural disaster since its inception. In October, while at Google X, we were contacted by Liberty Global, the largest ISP and fiber operator on the island to see if we could help with restoration for some of their hardest hit areas.

We quickly decided the south east portion of the island which was hardest hit would be the best place to focus and we picked Humacao, a city of approximately 40,000 (the hurricane entry point for the island) because it was clear it would take months and months to restore fiber connectivity in that town. We sent a team to PR and found the Liberty headend outside of Humacao destroyed but miraculously we found 10's of Gbps of live fiber buried in the rubble.

Crown Castle Tower, Humacao, Puerto Rico November, 2017

We set up a wireless optical communications (WOC) link from the roof of the headend to a Crown Castle tower, 5km away on the edge of town. We then set up a second link from the tower into the center of town and installed wifi access points in a number of places in Humacao including a university with 6,000 students, the town hall where they were serving thousands waiting in lines with meals and water, a local grocery story with 50,000 customers a week, a local hospital and the town center with dozens of businesses.

The entire system came up in less than 4 days and we were able to deliver 10's of Gbps of bandwidth into town using the WOC links. Over the next 7 weeks we delivered over 60TBytes of internet access to over 90,000 unique users. It was a great test of our technology and also an opportunity to do something positive in the world.