Bite Latvia representative: August storm exposed gaps in Latvia's critical infrastructure resilience

The storm that hit Latvia in late August, temporarily cutting electricity across a wide area of the country, has prompted a fresh look at how resilient the state's critical infrastructure really is. Mindaugas Rakauskas, a representative of mobile operator Bite Latvija, writes that power supply, communications, transport, fuel delivery and public administration are now so tightly interconnected that a disruption in one immediately affects all the others.

When power failed simultaneously over a large territory, the impact was felt by households, businesses, municipalities and telecom operators alike. Rakauskas notes that emergency calls to 112 are handled with priority regardless of which operator's network is available, but argues the real lesson lies elsewhere: rather than counting generators or batteries at each operator, the country needs to decide what overall level of resilience it wants to achieve.

He points out that Latvia's advanced communications infrastructure is the product of decades of investment — Bite Latvija alone has put roughly €200 million into its network since founding, maintaining more than 1,200 base stations equipped with backup batteries, with fixed and mobile generators at strategically important sites. Still, making all of the company's base stations able to run 72 hours without external power would require at least an additional €100 million, a figure Rakauskas says illustrates that this is a matter for the state as a whole, not a single sector.

He notes that no European country has built a fully autonomous solution for its entire mobile network, so a proportionate, risk-based approach is needed instead. Among possible steps, he lists strengthening power-grid resilience, creating a unified crisis-management and coordination mechanism, and requiring critical-infrastructure operators, state bodies and emergency services to use at least two operators' networks. He welcomed recent meetings with the transport minister and the prime minister, where concrete steps to strengthen the sector's resilience were discussed.