SpaceX's Starlink has proven its usefulness in connecting remote places to the Internet quickly and relatively easily in Washington, where like most West Coast fires they have caused massive damage to rural areas. A couple of small towns in the state have received Starlink connections to help locals and emergency responders.
The city of Malden has been almost completely destroyed, but restoration work is underway and, of course, it is useful to be able to access the internet to communicate with residents and authorities. With unreliable electricity and cellular service, satellite internet is a good temporary option and Starlink has come forward.
As SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter, the company is prioritizing rescuers and areas without the internet:
Glad SpaceX can help! We prioritize first responders and locations with no internet connectivity.
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 28, 2020
The effort is organized through the state's Emergency Management Division, a part of the military that, as might be expected, helps manage emergencies.
Steven Friederich, an EMD public information manager, explained in an email that the division has been using Starlink for a few weeks to provide public internet hotspots. The city "had a rather large fire through the city and burned down a good part of the area, including the fire station and post office. There simply hasn't been a way to get a fast, reliable Internet connection for the public to use, "he said.
"Space X voluntarily offered us the use of its equipment and our emergency communications staff were grateful to have it," he continued. "We were given seven terminals to use wherever we could use them for free. Space X, as you know, doesn't have coverage anywhere in the country, but as it happens, they have coverage here in our state. "
This would be due to the incompleteness of the Starlink constellation of satellites, which will eventually be thousands strong but currently "only" have around 600. Reliable coverage is limited to a few areas as SpaceX completes the system.
EMD has been working on the problem of how to maintain connectivity in the event of a disaster (or even a pandemic) for some time, and Starlink was the method they chose to test this time around.
"This is a device that we could definitely use if we were to have more fires or even bigger disasters, like a Cascadia subduction earthquake, where communication problems would be a huge hurdle," Friederich said.
The Cascadia subduction event is the looming catastrophic earthquake of the order of a 9 referred to colloquially (and fatalistically) by those in the region as "The Big One". If there's anything left after that, satellite internet connections will be really helpful in putting things back together.