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Verizon team brings temporary cell service to first responders
Verizon crisis response team brings mobile data capacity to first responders in hot zones.
MINNEAPOLIS — Access to data and phone service is critical for first responders in a natural disaster, especially those events that take down existing services.
Verizon is one of the companies that can fill that void, by bringing mobile crisis response experts and equipment to first responders. One of the company’s most important tools is a trailer called Spot that includes a generator, satellite dish, and portable cell service.
“The trailer is the workhorse of the crisis response teams,” Mike Olson, a crisis response manager for Verizon, told KARE 11.
“It’s specifically designed so we can pull up to an emergency operations, or mobile command center, and provide just that little bubble of cell service the first responders need.”
Last year he was dispatched to a search for a missing Wisconsin boy in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He said the temporary data service was essential to helping search commanders rescue the boy.
“All of their search and rescue technology is done through cellular phones, and without enough cell service their maps couldn’t work, so they had reverted to paper maps,” Olson explained.
“When we showed up the dots on their maps started showing up, and they were able to cordon off and mark off the maps where they’d searched already. We actually found that 8-year-old boy who’d been missing for 49 hours.”
Olson also travels with an electric mountain bike equipped with a pico cell network extender and Starlink satellite backhaul. It’s designed for getting into areas that are too remote or rugged for other mobile service vehicles.
He also provides aerial surveillance services to first responders using a drone that transmits live video and is equipped with a thermal imaging camera.
“Live video coverage back to their emergency operations center, so they could direct the people that are on the ground to do what they need them to do,” Olson said.
He noted that the mobile crisis equipment provides cell service to first responders regardless of carrier.
Verizon also has larger equipment that can be driven or towed to areas to provide temporary service or a boost. One of them can be used to replace a cell transmitter that has been knocked offline.
“An example of where we would use something like this is if there was a storm that damaged our antenna structure,” Rick Goldschmidt, Verizon’s regional engineering director, told KARE 11 as he stood next to a trailer with a portable tower on it.
“We could pull this up right next to it, take the fiber that’s in that building already and plug it into this asset and we’d be back up on the air.”
Goldschmidt and Olson spoke to KARE during a recent tour of Verizon’s switching operations center in the Twin Cities, where all cellphone calls, texts, and mobile data connections are processed. It’s a secure building at a location that is not publicized as an extra precaution.
The 70-thousand-square-foot structure serves Verizon customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska. Redundancy and resiliency are the watchwords of the operation, part of the overall mission of reliability.
“We like to say it’s like wearing a belt and suspenders with an extra belt in your back pocket,” Goldschmidt remarked.
The facility features rooms full of servers, some of which are designed to work with emergency cloud platforms and others for more traditional digital services. They’re both far removed from the days of long-distance operators at switchboards or mechanical switching machines that helped complete phone calls across a network.
“These are switching facilities, but switching is a dated term if you will. Now it’s all electronic. It’s all IP-based,” Goldschmidt explained.
There’s a lot of advanced technology at work just keeping the electronics cooled. Chilled air is pushed through the machines with fans, sending warm air into collection areas so it can be returned to the air handling system without making the rest of the room warm.
“No matter what the information that you’re doing on your phone, through the cell towers that come back through here, this is where it all gets processed, and it gets sent to a destination.”
Constant power flow through the facility is fortified with two three-megawatt generators in the facility’s parking lot, sitting on a week’s worth of diesel fuel.
“These generators are tested every week, so they run a cycle to make sure that not only do the generators start but it transfers the load, that the building uses, and then we feed our equipment and make sure that everything works without a glitch.”
What if there’s a gap between commercial power failure and the generators kicking in? There’s also a room full of high-capacity batteries that can back up the building until the juice starts to flow from the generator.
“You do not want to have an interruption in service at a facility like this!”
The crash happened when a Suburban pulling a trailer failed to stop at a stop sign, Minnesota State Patrol said.
WAUKENABO, Minn. — Two people from Minnetonka died in a crash Friday in Aitkin County while others, including children, were hurt.
According to Minnesota State Patrol, it happened at the intersection of Highway 169 and Grove Street/County Road 3 in Waukenabo Township at approximately 5:15 p.m.
A Suburban pulling a trailer was driving east on County Road 3 but did not stop at the stop sign at Highway 169, authorities said. The vehicle was struck by a northbound GMC Yukon. Two other vehicles were struck in the crash, but the people in those two cars were not injured.
In the Suburban, the driver sustained life-threatening injuries, according to State Patrol. Elizabeth Jane Baldwin, 61, of Minnetonka, and Marlo Dean Baldwin, 92, of Minnetonka, both died. Officials said the driver of the vehicle, a 61-year-old from Minnetonka, has life-threatening injuries.
There were six people in the Yukon when the crash occurred. The 44-year-old driver, as well as passengers ages 18, 14, and 11, sustained what officials described as life-threatening injuries. The other two passengers have non-life-threatening injuries.
Alcohol is not believed to be a factor in the crash, but officials said Elizabeth Jane Baldwin had not been wearing a seatbelt.
Among those at the start line this year will be Alex Vigil.
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Pixar’s second installment of the movie features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
MINNEAPOLIS — Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” universe plays out inside the mind of the movie’s adolescent protagonist, Riley.
She plays a kid from Minnesota whose family uproots her life by moving to San Francisco. But did you know that what plays out in Riley’s mind actually comes from the mind of a real-life Minnesotan?
“You are one of us!” said Breaking the News anchor Jana Shortal.
“Yes, I am!” said Burnsville native and the movie’s creator and director, Kelsey Mann.
Mann was chosen for the role by ANOTHER Minnesotan — Pete Docter, the man behind the original movie, “Inside Out.”
“I don’t know if Pete asked me to do this movie because I was from Minnesota and he was from Minnesota … I just think it worked out that way,” Mann said.
How two guys from the south metro made a pair of Pixar movies that would change the game is a hell of a story that began with Docter in 2015.
“He [Docter] was just trying to tell a fun story — an emotional, fun story — and didn’t realize how much it would help give kids a vocabulary to talk about things they were feeling because they are feeling those emotions, but they’re really hard to talk about,” Mann said.
Some parents, counselors and teachers might even tell you it did more good for kids than just entertain them. It unlocked their emotions and begged for what Mann set out to create at the beginning of 2020.
“That part was fun, particularly fun,” he said. “I think the daunting part was following up a film that everyone really loved.”
But Mann knew what he wanted to do with the movie’s follow-up, “Inside Out 2.”
“Diving into Riley’s adolescence … that was just fun,” he said.
This time around, Riley is 13, hitting puberty and facing all of what, and who, comes with it. The franchise’s second installment features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
“I think that’s what’s fun about the ‘Inside Out’ world: You can take something we all know and give it a face,” Mann said. “We can give anxiety a name and a face.”
The film follows Riley’s emotions fighting it out for control of her life. Joy wants Riley to stay young and hold on only to joy, while anxiety is hell-bent on taking over Riley over at the age of 13 because as a lot of us know, that’s when anxiety often moves in.
“I always pitched it as a takeover movie, like an emotional takeover,” Mann said. “Anxiety can kind of feel like that; it can take over and kind of shove your other emotions to the side and repress them.”
For a kids’ movie, it’s hard to watch this animation play out, even when an adult has the keys to decide.
“I’m making a movie about anxiety and I still have to remind myself to have my anxiety take a seat,” Mann said.
All of our individual anxieties have a place in this world.
“The whole movie honestly is about acceptance. Both acceptance of anxiety being there and also of your own flaws,” said Mann.
Even for our kids, we have to remember that this is life.
Anxiety will come for them; it does for us all.
The “Inside Out” world just shows them it’s so.
