Establish whether transport dominance is a general terrain effect

Establish whether transport-outage dominance is a general consequence of mountainous, constrained-route terrain rather than a feature specific to Hurricane Helene or the six states analyzed.

Background

The study finds transport dominance over the full record in mountainous Tennessee and North Carolina, whereas power dominates in the four other reporting states. It also lacks an independent measure of route diversity and includes only six states from one hurricane.

The authors identify cross-event analysis of other DIRS activations as the direct way to test whether transport dominance is associated with terrain, with Hurricane Helene specifically, or with modern cellular infrastructure more generally. They explicitly state that the current evidence cannot establish the terrain mechanism.

References

We scope each claim accordingly, but cannot test the terrain mechanism itself with six states and no route-diversity data.

— The Towers Were Standing: A Cause Decomposition of Cellular Outages During Hurricane Helene  (2609.10944 - Olukola et al., 10 Sep 2026) in Section 7.2, “Limitations of the analysis”; Section 7.3, “Future work”