Najanjito (Little Orange)

Today we descended upon Najanjito. Naranjito (Spanish pronunciation: [naɾaŋˈxito], Little Orange) is a municipality of Puerto Rico (U.S.) located in the central region of the island, south of Toa Alta; north of Barranquitas and Comerío; east of Corozal; and west of Bayamón. Naranjito is spread over 15 wards and Naranjito Pueblo (The downtown area and the administrative center of the city).[1]

We rolled in to see quite a bit of devastated areas.

The day started off a little rough one satellite system need a little fine tuning this morning, but with the quick help from the team from Kymeta, Alex was able to tweak a few things and get it back purring like a kitten.

The next issue has been the one that has been plaguing us since we started, and that is a wifi system that wasn't quite robust enough to handle the extreme loads of the crowds and FEMA team members.

Last night late, couldn't sleep, made a command decision to take all that PoE wifi gear offline and replace it with the Apple Airport Extremes, one for each vehicle/network. We gave FEMA there own. It took a little time to configure but we were up and running by 1030AM and FEMA was giving us high fives. Last I heard FEMA was nearing around 400 claims submitted directly into FEMA system via Laptop/Tablet --> Apple Airport Extreme --> Kymeta Satcom System --> Intelsat -- Internet -- FEMA. This is so much faster and precise rather than paper versions of claims where tracking can get lost or misplaced. Folks filing claims received phone messages that FEMA received their claims for processing. I absolutely love taking a seemingly hard problem and simplifying it. Seeing folks hug their FEMA processors is now really dear to my heart. Great job today FEMA Team!!!

This is me giving my assistant Ricky the thumbs on no packet loss and awesome bandwidth back to the states. We solved the issue... What a sigh of relief...

Since we dumped the PoE equipment we didn't have any packet loss any further. We did however experience high volumes of traffic on the citizen networks we set up specifically for them. I started to fine tune the Airport Extremes and found a way to prune heavy usage.

For our next add is a Fortinet/Fortigate Firewall so we can help to deter the phone hungry updates that can crush our networks. Xavier and I just finished reconfiguring the citizen systems so we're ready to go tomorrow morning bright and early with whatever Murphy wants to throw at us...

Absolutely a full house today, I couldn't believe the lines of folks coming to file claims.

Healthcare folks came as well. It's really amazing what the entire team has been able to organize and pull together.

The Chef Team was there again providing lunch for everyone, yum!

Volunteers assisting in passing out the yum yums. :)

Right around the corner a huge line formed for bags of food and supplies. Lots of volunteers assisted in ensuring everyone was taken care of.

Just like in days past, folks hung out right up until we left connecting to friends, family, work, FEMA, and various other social interests.

A lot of happy campers today. I love seeing the smiles when you provide Internet access. :)

Everyone showed up today. Alan (white shirt) has such a steady, soothing, calming voice as he passionately called each family's name to process FEMA claims. He should think about the clergy. :) Nice work Alan!

The 1 First Bank was there again like clockwork to provide much need cash from ATMs.

And last but not least the star of the show for today, the Mobile Research Lab which provide us a quiet, cool, dry, high-tech office/lab environment to work on some of these tough on the go communication problems. This vehicle has been a Godsend! Thanks Erwin Hymer Group!!!