Why does FEMA hate communication?
Pure speculations — FEMA, as a branch of DHS, has a default incident response plan that assumes a terrorist attack, wherein you (theoretically) may want to control further communication from potential terrorists. They went forward with that plan in spite of the situation not being applicable. I don’t think that’s a good explanation and I don’t think cutting comm lines in case of a terrorist attack is necessarily a good idea. But if I was giving FEMA the benefit of the doubt, that’d be my first guess.
I should add: most people seem to be misinterpreting what “cutting” the lines means in this case. It is highly unlikely that cutting means anything destructive: such as a back-hoe to a main cable or a knife to a small one. More likely, it means disconnecting a short, 26 gauge jumper at a central telco distribution point. And most likely, FEMA did it to hook up their lines, not to be malicious. Under every day circumstances, an actual cut to a major cable would take a lot of man power to fix. Telco techs don’t actually construct anything when they hook up phone or data service. Rather, they simply connect together a bunch of existing pieces. If those pieces break, they are only repaired slowly, and its done in batches, in the best of times, by specialist rather than regular techs. Thus to “cut” a line would almost certainly mean nothing more than disconnecting a couple of the pieces somewhere in the chain, in a very non-permanent way. If an actual cut had been done, it is highly unlikel
