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| Home Federal, State and Local Leaders Advised to check GETS, WPS Subscriptions and Use Priority Service During Hurricane Ike Arlington, VA. September 11, 2008 - With Hurricane Ike on the doorstep of reaching the Texas coastline, officials with the Department of Homeland Security’s National Communications System (NCS) are advising all subscribers of the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS) to test their subscriptions and verify their telephone contact numbers before Hurricane Ike reaches land. GETS and WPS provide priority communications to the nation’s emergency response personnel under a variety of conditions. GETS, which provides priority service communications to Federal, State and local users; first responders; and leaders of key critical infrastructures, uses telephone lines in order to route priority calls. WPS – the wireless partner to GETS – provides the same priority services for registered wireless users. GETS and WPS users should be aware that there may be limitations to GETS access if there are problems with the public telephone network. During Hurricane Gustav, Federal, State and local emergency officials in Baton Rouge were unable to complete GETS calls due to the service disruption of a public “tandem” communications switch which connects local service to long distance service. This disruption was the result of a storm-inflicted disconnection of a fiber communications cable in Baton Rouge. The situation in Baton Rouge was a rare occurrence affecting GETS availability. The NCS urges GETS and WPS users to look at the back of their GETS and WPS calling cards to reacquaint themselves with dialing instructions. Alternatively, NCS also encourages users, in the event their call does not go through immediately, to continue their attempts to connect using GETS. In addition, users who have WPS service should use it as an alternative to land line telephone service. Furthermore, WPS or cellular users should attempt to place GETS calls using their wireless service. Using one of these alternative methods will increase user’s chances of completing a call, since these systems may use different telephone equipment and networks to complete calls. GETS became a fully operational system in September 2001 and provided priority service communications supporting a variety of regional and national emergencies, including the 2001 September 11 attacks, Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, and the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota and last year’s California wildfires. WPS was created as a result of the September 11 attacks and began providing wireless priority calls in 2002. It is a service that is available through most of the Nation’s major wireless carriers. For more information on the GETS and WPS programs, visit http://gets.ncs.gov and http://wps.ncs.gov.
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