Weak infrastructure, distrust make communication during natural disasters hard on rural Texas

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LIVINGSTON — In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, Marilyn Mayville wasn’t sure where to get help.

The 72-year-old East Texan was without power and reliable cell service. Her phone was quickly running out of power. A heat wave had settled in. A nephew in Dallas eventually reached the widow and told her about a cooling center just on the other side of Highway 59 from her apartment.

“I didn’t really know what to do, but it gets pretty warm at night,” Mayville said. “He’s in Dallas and he knows more than I do.”

On that first day after Beryl, Mayville said she was one of just five people at the cooling station. If Beryl was quick to drench Livingston, a town still recovering from a rash of floods earlier this year, news of community resources was slow to reach residents.

By the next day Mayville was joined by dozens of other Livingston residents.

At the cooling station, Mayville kept up with neighbors and her church family in those periods where cell service returned.

Communication is key for keeping residents safe during a disaster. Rural communities, especially in East Texas, start from a deficit. Much of the region lacks quality broadband and cellphone access making it difficult for residents to track developments from news organizations online.

And there is a growing distrust in institutions such as the news media and government.

It comes as no surprise to Jennifer Horney, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware and former associate professor at Texas A&M, that rural residents say they feel uninformed during and after disasters.

“When official notifications come out, people either don't trust it or they believe that their local knowledge is more accurate than a recommendation from the state or federal government,” Horney said.

Rural residents often prefer to find their information through social media, friends and neighbors, Horney said.

Most residents in Deep East Texas, which includes Polk County and Livingston, should receive alerts through the Genasys Mass Notification System operated by the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, a coalition of local governments.

“The Genasys Platform utilizes voice, text and email messages as well as geofencing to select certain areas of a city or county to be targeted for messages,” said Lonnie Hunt, the council’s director. “The Genasys Platform sends messages to landline phones, obtained through an interlocal agreement with the DETCOG Regional 9-1-1 Program, and the numbers are updated quarterly.”

It is also very common for the counties to maintain active social media accounts, even if just to share information from the National Weather Service, Texas Storm Chasers or the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

Polk County also utilizes its own text message system, AlertMePolkCounty, and County Judge Sydney Murphy keeps the messaging consistent across platforms and news releases. As the county’s chief executive and head of emergency management, she believes her job is to keep residents informed when disaster strikes – which it has multiple times this year.

Regular posts with information ranging from weather alerts to opportunities for assistance litter the emergency management Facebook page in a bid to keep residents safe, but also help them rebuild.

“I'm the one that's sitting there, answering questions and sending out information to make sure that it is immediate,” Murphy said. “The minute we receive notice that this road is caving, or that road is closed, we immediately send out the notification so there's no confusion about it.”

Beryl, the most recent storm to roll through East Texas, was the second natural disaster to hit the community in a matter of months and followed a stormy winter season that kept Polk County residents on alert.

But these attempts at communication can only go so far as infrastructure allows. Whether it is a news organization posting regular updates online, or a county judge making Facebook posts, someone without service won’t see it. Likewise, systems like AlertMe or Genasys can relay information quickly and effectively, but only if the person on the receiving end has actual cell service.

A lack of access to broadband has long beleaguered communities like those Murphy serves. The council conducted a broadband study in partnership with inCode Consulting, a global telecommunications consulting firm in 2019.

The study determined that broadband only effectively served 15% of what was actually needed. High speed internet was most accessible near schools and utility coops, but was limited otherwise.

Texans approved $1.5 billion in tax dollars to expand broadband access and emergency communications in 2023. The federal government allocated billions more. So more of the state should be on the path for connectivity, but developing that infrastructure will take time.

Furthermore, cellular service – which is reportedly better than broadband through the region – is still unreliable, especially in the unincorporated communities between established towns.

Murphy is actively expanding broadband across the county to provide full coverage for all her residents. Polk County parlayed a grant to multiple telecommunications providers to expand broadband to the entirety of Polk County.

“By the end of 2025, Polk County will have full fiber connectivity north to south and east to west and redundancy,” Murphy said. “No other rural community around us has that right or even or even as close to it.”

And Polk County used American Rescue Plan Act funds to construct a 440 foot communications tower that cellular providers can rent space on to provide better cell service.

Building trust is a different challenge.

There are still days when Murphy’s inboxes are filled with people complaining about how things are handled. Which she tends to ignore, unless they’re in regard to something she can actually fix. But there are also moments when residents ask a poignant question that would benefit the rest of the community to know, so Murphy does her best to answer those effectively and broadcast them.

She has found that her methods of communication have established some trust not just among her constituents, but of those in surrounding communities. After each disaster, she sees an uptick in subscriptions to the county’s text service and followers on social media.

“We have a lot of people that follow our Facebook page that are from San Jacinto County, Tyler County and Trinity County,” Murphy said. “During the pandemic and during (Hurricane) Harvey, we even had people from Harris County sending us questions.”

Polk County residents, Marissa Suski and her husband, Brian, felt lost about who to believe as Hurricane Beryl began to turn north.

The path of the hurricane had changed and was barreling directly toward them. Further exacerbating their worries, rumors of the Lake Livingston Dam failing had spread like wildfire.

“One person says one thing and you call and another person says something else,” Brian Suski said. “One person said the dam was going to fail. Another person said no, we’re just taking precautions to notify everybody. It was a lot of back and forth.”

They looked to news outlets, social media and made their own calls to government agencies but felt the answers were different from every source.

The one system they found had the most reliable information were text messages that came unbidden to their phones. The Suskis didn’t know where the texts were coming from, but they told them about boil-water notices in the past and kept them up-to-date with the flooding in April. Following Beryl, they learned quickly about the Polk County cooling stations, what help the state was sending and where to pick up MREs.

“I’m not going to lie, believe it or not, I trust those things more than what’s coming out of a human’s mouth,” Marissa said. “They’ve been pretty right on key.”

The texts were coming from Murphy.

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