As tropical depressions continue to form in the waters surrounding Hawaiʻi, winds and rain have already begun to impact the islands.
Weather conditions triggered the cancellation of the Nā Wāhine O Ke Kai canoe race due to hazards along the Kaiwi Channel crossing.
Additionally, storms have had an impact on the state’s network of cell phone service towers, affecting wireless communication.
To learn more about the impact and how wireless carriers are responding, HPR spoke with Rommel Angeles, who serves as the Associate Vice President of Network Engineering for Verizon’s Northern California office, which covers the Hawaiʻi region.
Interview Highlights
On the state of Hawaiʻi’s communication infrastructure
ROMMEL ANGELES: Overall, our network has fared really well. We stood up to these various different storms, and that speaks to the level of preparation that we have and the resiliency of our network. And, you know, the biggest challenges that we had were mostly attributed to commercial power outages. Island of Kauaʻi had — almost all the island was out of power, but even with that, our network stood firm because the way that we build our sites, we always keep resiliency in mind to make sure that we could withstand severe weather, especially for high-risk areas like coastal parts of Hawaiʻi.
On preparing resources before a storm
ANGELES: The location of resources strategically located at the particular island at risk is also very important. So during the Lowell storm, we actually add additional resources. Be on island ahead of the storm coming in because we expected Līhuʻe Airport to be closed. So we had folks there already in station, and definitely they were busy as the storm kind of passed through. And we're doing the same thing for the Big Island with this tropical storm that's projected to come Thursday and Friday.
On post-storm recovery efforts
ANGELES: We visit every single site that we have in our network as part of our restoration and recovery, because the cell site may not have gone down, but it may have been damaged as to your point, right? So we want to make sure that if there is an issue at the cell site that needs to be addressed in preparation for another storm to come up, we address them right away. … Soon after restoration, we go to our audit of our cell sites to make sure that they're not only repaired, if there's repair needed, but also to be ready for the next storm that comes in. And in the past couple of months, they've been coming every other week or every week, so it's imperative for us to move on that quickly.
Since Hurricane Lowell struck Hawaiʻi, Verizon has been providing relief by waiving charges for its customers. More information can be found here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 23, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
