Ramona Adams
Iridium Communications continues to provide satellite communications services in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico to aid hurricane recovery efforts, NASASpaceflight.com reported Saturday.
Iridium CEO Matt Desch, an inductee into Executive Mosaic‘s Wash100 for 2017, told the publication that Iridium saw an increase in satcom demand in the Carribean and Puerto Rico “on a scale that we have not seen before.”
Desch added that Hurricane Maria triggered an approximately 3,900 percent increase in Iridium satcom use in Puerto Rico — from 500 minutes per day to 20,000 minutes daily.
Commercial satcom devices that operate on Puerto Rico also grew from five to 10 different platforms to almost 2,000 unique systems, the report noted.
Iridium entered contracts with service partners who pre-positioned satcom assets with regional distributors in an effort to provide rapid hurricane response.
The company’s satcom devices, including the push-to-talk service, worked to facilitate communications between emergency responders to support missions such as area evacuations due to post-storm flooding
