3 Emergencies That Put MEVO to the Test

Key Takeaways:

• Real-event performance is the only proof that matters. Every vendor produces a disaster-recovery slide deck. Nashville, Hurricane Helene, and Hurricane Milton each created conditions no slide deck anticipated. And every PSAP on INDIGITAL’s network answered calls through all three. The record exists; ask any vendor for theirs before signing.
• MEVO runs continuously, not just in emergencies. MEVO’s three deployment configurations (statewide, site-resident, and the portable MEVO Anywhere Kit) mean backup call handling is active before an event begins, not assembled after one starts. The same kit Lenawee County deploys for a NASCAR weekend at Michigan International Speedway is the kit that handled Hurricane Milton across 30+ Florida counties.
• Operational discipline is the other half of the architecture. Geographic redundancy and multi-path transport hold up only when the people behind them are already in motion. Monthly disaster simulations, post-event Reports of Outage within hours, Root Cause Analyses within 24-48 hours, and U.S.-based engineers available by name on a Saturday at 3 a.m. are what convert a resilient architecture into a resilient system.

Downtown Nashville was about as quiet and empty as it gets the morning of Dec. 25, 2020. Then, at 6:30 a.m., a recreational vehicle parked on Second Avenue North outside an AT&T transmission building cut through the silence with a strange broadcast. Fifteen minutes later, the RV detonated, severing voice, data, and 911 traffic across statelines.

The outages persisted for days, with phone service degraded throughout parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Yet, every PSAP on the INDIGITAL network within the affected radius answered Christmas morning calls without interruption. While its local connectivity was being restored, Franklin County had its 911 traffic rerouted to Colbert County, AL via INDIGITAL’s Managed Emergency Voice Operations (MEVO) services for about twelve hours. Across the rest of the network, zero call delivery was lost.

Every 911 vendor has a disaster-recovery slide deck, peppered with language about dual nodes, geographic separation, multi-path interconnection, and 24/7 operations. What separates a slide deck from a system that works is whether the deployment has been put through a real event, and whether the discipline behind it caught the failure before it could spread. This is the part of NG911 that gets the least attention, because backup systems are invisible when they work. It is also the part that, on the worst day a community will ever have, becomes the only part that matters.

Helene and Milton: Two Storms, Two Weeks Apart

Four years after Nashville, Hurricane Helene came ashore. It tracked through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Two weeks later, Hurricane Milton followed, hitting central Florida directly.

During Helene, when fiber and LTE both failed, a Starlink terminal pre-installed at Franklin County, Florida remained at 100% uptime with zero obstruction throughout the event, carrying MEVO call-handling traffic out of the county by satellite. 

For Milton, INDIGITAL’s entire MEVO services footprint was in place before the storm touched down: more than 30 Starlink terminals and 14 MEVO Anywhere Kits, routed in from Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, and other Florida counties, with 25 INDIGITAL personnel deployed in-state. When PSAPs lost power or had to relocate, the MEVO services picked up the slack, handing Flagler County, FL’s calls to St. Johns County, FL, until power returned.

There’s a clear pattern across all three events: redundant architecture pre-deployed before the event, personnel mobilized ahead of landfall, and a backup call-handling platform running continuously.

What Are MEVO Services, and Why Are They Essential Before the Storm

MEVO services, or Managed Emergency Voice Operations, is the combination of services and a platform that makes the response examples outlined above possible. It is a complete, NENA i3-aligned call-handling system, network services and support that runs parallel to the primary PSAP, ready to take over in whole or in part within seconds.

It deploys in three patterns:

Statewide MEVO services. Every primary PSAP in Indiana, all 104 PSAPs in Alabama (live Q4 2025), 100% of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, 94.5% of Missouri, and more than 85% of Florida. This platform bundled with the network services and support, is the operational backbone for service continuity across these states.

Site-resident MEVO services. A second physical instance at the PSAP, on independent power and connectivity, ready to take calls if the primary system fails. Standard practice across INDIGITAL’s direct deployments.

MEVO Anywhere Kit (MAK). The portable rugged-case version: 911 and administrative call-handling, FirstNet-capable router, FortiGate firewall, FortiExtender for cellular failover, and optional satellite connectivity, in a hardened transit case one or two people can deploy from a vehicle.

The same MAK that powers a NASCAR weekend at Michigan International Speedway, when Lenawee County stands up an on-site mobile PSAP, is the kit that made the Milton response possible. An ECC that has practiced deploying MEVO for a planned event has, in effect, practiced for the disaster.

Disaster-ready architecture is necessary but not sufficient. The other half is operational discipline: monthly disaster simulations, post-event Reports of Outage drafted within hours, full Root Cause Analyses within 24 to 48 hours, and FCC-compliant reporting through NORS and DIRS.

INDIGITAL’s 24/7 Network and Security Operations Center is staffed by engineers, U.S.-based end to end. When a PSAP director calls during an event, a knowledgeable person answers and works the problem on the same call – no offshore tier-one queue, no context-less 2 a.m. handoff. The engineers who answer the phone at three in the morning on a Saturday are the same engineers who designed the routing logic for that customer’s deployment. 

What 911 COOP Planning Is, and Why Every ECC Needs One

A Continuity of Operations Plan, or COOP, is the written document that tells a 911 center how to keep answering calls when the conditions a normal day assumes no longer hold: the dispatch center is uninhabitable, the primary phone system is down, the staff is stranded, the power is off, the carrier circuits are cut.

Federal agencies have maintained COOPs since FEMA Federal Continuity Directive 1, and most NENA technical standards assume one is in place. In practice, many ECCs do not have a current one – or they have a plan written for a building they no longer occupy. A functional 911 COOP answers four questions, in writing, before the disaster arrives:

• Where do calls go if this center cannot take them?
• Who has authority to order the cutover, and how do they reach the people who execute it?
• What are the SLAs and notification paths with every vendor whose system has to participate –  NGCS, ESInet, CHE, GIS, CAD, recording, admin lines?
• How is the plan exercised so staff can run it under load, not just read it?

Where MEVO Meets the COOP

Each common failure scenario maps to a MEVO answer:

The primary CHE fails. Site-resident MEVO services take over; Telecommunicators stay at their consoles on the parallel system.

The building is unusable. A MAK goes to the alternate site (a fire station, an EOC, an unaffected neighbor’s spare room), comes up in under an hour, and the center is back on the air at a new address.

Every terrestrial circuit into the footprint is gone. A pre-positioned Starlink terminal and FirstNet-capable router carry the traffic, such as Franklin County during Helene. 

A COOP is also where geo-diverse mutual aid lives. Charleston and Collier counties wrote their long-distance arrangement into both centers’ COOP documents in advance, tested it twice, and let the standards-based interconnection do the work when the storm came. 

Building or Refreshing a COOP

• Tier the failure scenarios. Partial outage, site loss, regional event. Each tier has a different first move and a different set of authorities.
• Name the people, not the roles. “The on-call supervisor” is not a phone number. The actual number of the person on call this week is.
• Write cutover steps as checklists, with the vendor’s NSOC number on the first line of each.
• Exercise it. Quarterly walkthroughs and at least one full annual exercise that includes deploying a MAK to the alternate site under realistic conditions. A COOP that has never been exercised is only a hypothesis.
• Update it whenever a vendor changes. Perform a CHE refresh, an ESInet swap, and a GIS provider change before the contract closes, not months after.

What This Means for the Procurement

An NG911 RFP’s disaster-recovery section should ask for three specific things: 

First, a documented dual Node A / Node B architecture with multi-path carrier interconnection. Second, a portable backup call-handling capability deployable to a remote site within hours, with a documented inventory and pre-positioning plan for hurricane and severe-weather seasons. Third, named in-state operational personnel with named on-call contact paths.

Vendors who answer those three with specifics are the ones who will keep your PSAP on the air through a sustained outage. Vendors who answer with brochure language about “best-in-class redundancy” and “industry-leading uptime” are speaking  slide-deck language.

Bottom line: There is no version of NG911 that does not get tested. Every system, eventually, meets the worst day a community will ever have. The question for any 911 authority writing an RFP or weighing a renewal is whether the partner on the other side of the contract has already been tested – and whether they will hand you the operational record of those tests, in detail, before you sign.

Meet INDIGITAL at NENA 2026

INDIGITAL will be at NENA 2026 in Columbus later this month. Stop by the booth #713 to see a MEVO Anywhere Kit deployed live (the same portable call-handling system that kept PSAPs answering through Helene and Milton) and to walk through what disaster-ready operations and a working COOP look like for your own jurisdiction. 

To line up a booth meeting before the show, reach out and we’ll get it on the calendar!

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