"I would say not during hurricane season 2026." That was VITEMA Director Daryl Jaschen's answer on September 5, when someone at a preparedness meeting in Coral Bay asked him the only question anyone in the room actually cared about: does the new cell tower fix the dead zones. Jaschen had spent that same Friday morning at the tower site talking to the people who run it. His verdict, delivered to a room full of first responders and nonprofit staff, was that connectivity there "remains a work in progress."
If you live east of Cruz Bay, you already know the backstory. For years, cell service along Route 107, from Coral Bay south along the bay's coast, has been unreliable enough that residents complained not just about dropped calls but about something stranger: dialing 911 and reaching an operator in the British Virgin Islands instead of St. Thomas. The tower at the junction of Route 10 and Route 107 was supposed to be the fix. It took roughly five years to get there. It is standing now. Whether it actually solves the problem you've been living with is a more complicated answer than "yes" or "no."
Five Years From Proposal to Monopole
The tower now standing at Route 10 and Route 107 started as an AT&T project, back when AT&T still held the Virgin Islands wireless assets that later went to Liberty Mobile. It moved through the government leasing and permitting process for years before it reached the Coastal Zone Management Committee for final approval in November 2024. Liberty had reduced the tower's height from 100 feet to 80 feet after resident pushback at an earlier public hearing, and the company described the support structure as a "stealth facility" designed not to be obvious to anyone driving past.
The tower is part of the federally funded FirstNet network, built primarily for police, fire, rescue and other first responders. When that dedicated spectrum isn't being used for emergency traffic, it's designed to also improve service for regular Liberty customers in the area. That's the theory. The September 5 meeting was the first real test of whether the theory holds up in the place it was built to fix.
What Actually Got Fixed, and What Didn't
Here's where the story gets more specific than "the tower isn't ready." Jaschen tested two different things that Friday, and they came back with two different answers.
The first was the 911-routing problem, the one where calls from Coral Bay have sometimes been picked up by an operator in Tortola instead of St. Thomas. Jaschen made a test call on his FirstNet phone. It reached an operator on St. Thomas. He tried again from his personal phone. Same result. "No one in Tortola picked up and said, 'May I help you?'" he told the group. For that specific failure mode, the one that means an emergency call in Coral Bay might not reach a Virgin Islands dispatcher at all, the early signs are good.
The second problem is the one residents have complained about longer: the actual dead zones along Route 107, the stretches of road and coastline where you simply don't have a signal at all, FirstNet or otherwise. On that question, Jaschen was direct. Connectivity there is still "a work in progress," and by his own timeline, not resolved before this hurricane season ends. He framed the tower as "part of the bigger picture for the territory," which is true, but it's also a way of saying the picture isn't finished yet.
If you live in Coral Bay, that distinction matters more than a single yes-or-no headline would suggest. It means a 911 call you manage to place this season has a better shot at reaching the right island. It does not mean you'll be able to place that call from everywhere you used to lose signal.
Coral Bay Still Doesn't Have Its Own Shelter
The tower wasn't the only gap discussed at that meeting. Deputy Police Chief Clayton Brown told the group that in a major storm, initial response would fall to V.I. Fire and Emergency Medical Services, with fuller response capability arriving only after Public Works clears roads. Police response depends on staffing, and most officers assigned to St. John commute over from St. Thomas, meaning the same road-clearing bottleneck applies there too.
Coral Bay itself has no designated emergency shelter. The nearest options, the Cruz Bay Community Hub and the Adrian Senior Center, are roughly eight miles away on the other side of the island. Testimony given to the territory's Committee on Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure, and Planning in July laid out why that matters even before you factor in distance: only one shelter can be opened per island, and Jaschen told lawmakers his top concern is having certified nurses on site before any shelter opens at all, a problem tied to a territory-wide nursing shortage that surfaced repeatedly in that hearing.
That leaves Coral Bay's sizable population of live-aboard boaters in a particular spot. Love City Strong Director Mehgan Enright, speaking at the same September meeting, put it plainly: having a sheltering plan doesn't mean going to a shelter, it means identifying somewhere safe to be. For boaters specifically, that means deciding now where you'll relocate on land, and getting there before tropical storm force winds arrive, not after.
The Season So Far, By the Numbers
NOAA's outlook for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, issued May 21, projected 8 to 14 named storms, 3 to 6 hurricanes, and 1 to 3 major hurricanes, a forecast NOAA itself classified as likely below normal. Jaschen has repeated the same caution every time that number comes up: a quiet forecast doesn't mean a quiet season, and it only takes one storm to cause serious damage here.
The July testimony to lawmakers assigned the territory's overall readiness a grade of B-, and Coral Bay's situation wasn't an isolated complaint buried in a community meeting. Jaschen told the same legislative committee that the territory's Capstone readiness exercise had specifically identified "St. John operational gaps" as one of several unresolved issues, alongside shelter staffing, points of distribution confusion, and communication quality generally. In other words, what residents heard informally at the September 5 meeting matches what the territory's own emergency management director told lawmakers on the record two months earlier.
Peak hurricane season in the Virgin Islands runs from mid-August through late October. As of this month, Coral Bay is still inside that window, with roughly nine weeks left before the season's traditional close on November 30.
What This Means If You're Still Home in Coral Bay
A few practical points come directly out of what officials said at the September meeting and in July's testimony, translated for anyone actually living east of Cruz Bay right now:
- If you need to call 911 this season, early testing suggests the call is more likely to reach a Virgin Islands operator than a Tortola one, but that only helps if you have signal to make the call in the first place.
- The nearest designated shelter is roughly eight miles away in Cruz Bay. If you're planning to shelter rather than stay home, that drive is part of your plan, not an afterthought.
- If you live aboard a boat in the harbor, the guidance from Love City Strong is to identify a specific place on land now, not to wait and decide once a storm is named.
- Insurance changes generally aren't available once a storm has a name attached to it, which means roof, shutter and window repairs matter most in the weeks before anything is brewing, not after.
- Signing up for Alert VI through VITEMA remains the fastest way to get real-time updates by call, text or email if cell coverage in your specific stretch of Coral Bay is one of the ones still catching up.
None of this means Coral Bay is unprepared. It means the specific fix residents have waited years for arrived close to on time but not quite finished, and the honest answer from the person responsible for testing it was that this season will run on the old patchwork a little longer.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property you own or manage in Coral Bay, from insurance timing to how a place actually performs through a real storm season, that's a conversation Clear Water Realty has with owners across St. John every year. Reach out when you're ready to talk through it.
