The Towers Stayed Standing. So What Was Still Broken?

COCKE COUNTY, Tenn. — By Oct. 19, 2024, the cellular outage Hurricane Helene left across Tennessee had almost disappeared from the federal disaster reports.

Only three cell sites remained reported out of service. Two were in Cocke County. One was in Jefferson County.

None was attributed to commercial power failure. None was listed as out because of physical damage to the cell site.

All three carried the same explanation:

Transport.

That word is easy to overlook in a spreadsheet. It also helps explain why communications infrastructure can appear intact after a disaster and still fail.

A cell tower does not operate alone. Its antennas and radios have to send voice calls and data into a carrier’s larger network, often through fiber or microwave connections commonly referred to as backhaul. If that path is severed, the tower can have electricity and functioning equipment while remaining disconnected from the network it is supposed to serve.

The tower can still be standing while the system behind it is broken.

TRP’s reconstruction of three weeks of federal outage records shows that, as East Tennessee recovered from Helene, that hidden connection increasingly became the problem that remained.