With the heart of the hurricane season ahead, wireless phone companies in South Carolina want their COWS and COLTS ready to move out.

No, that doesn’t mean companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint and T-Mobile have branched into livestock business.

COWS and COLTS are acronyms for the emergency mobile equipment that wireless providers will use to keep cellular phone service up and running if a hurricane hits South Carolina.

Cell phones, of course, will be used in a storm for more than calling grandma.

First responders might use cell phones to communicate with other agencies and headquarters.

And some power companies serving South Carolina plan to use online social network Twitter as one means of notifying customers. The utilities will send text messages about outages via Twitter to customers who sign up for the service.

Reliability has become a key selling point, and cell companies say they’ve learned a lot since storms like Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Ike in 2008 clobbered sections of the Gulf Coast.

For example:

More than 1,000 cell sites were destroyed by Katrina, which ravaged Louisiana and Alabama, killing more than 1,800 people.

Ike, which slammed into a 100-mile stretch between Louisiana and Texas, damaged up to 85 percent of the cell towers in its path.

The wireless companies have approached this storm season with the kind of backup planning and built-in redundancies that might impress a four-star general at the Pentagon.

• Mobile command centers, stocked with prepackaged meals and tents and equipped with kitchens and bathrooms, stand ready to roll at a moment’s notice toward a trouble spot.
• Fleets of mobile units equipped with antennas, called COLTs or Cells on Light Trucks wait to be dispatched.
• Also in the companies’ arsenals are COWs, Cells on Wheels, which are mobile cell sites that can provide extra call capacity or restore service after a storm.
• Some of the companies even have mobile stores stocked with phones and accessories to serve customers.

Being prepared for the worst is just part of the business, spokesmen said.

“Our planning process for hurricanes is well practiced and consistent,” said Krista Berlincourt of T-Mobile. “Also, we have a national (corporate-level) business continuity team that also engages on major natural disasters. This is to ensure that we are not only taking care of the network, but also looking at other things we can do to help our customers, the general public, and also our own employees in affected areas.”

With cell phones being used by just about everyone from cops to power companies to keep in touch, wireless providers say they’ve invested millions to keep their networks operating in the wake of a disaster.

“AT&T is committed to maintaining and restoring communications as quickly as possible should a severe hurricane hit while at the same time assisting with overall relief efforts locally,” said Alison Hall, an AT&T-Carolinas vice president.

Such a commitment means spending a lot of money. AT&T said it spent $500 million nationwide, but declined to break out a figure for specific states. T-Mobile did not release a figure for South Carolina.

Sprint reported it spent $16 million last year, including $3.6 million in Myrtle Beach, to shore up its infrastructure in South Carolina.

Verizon, which claims to have the most reliable wireless network, spent $30 million over the past year to bolster service in South Carolina, said spokeswoman Karen Schulz. That money included building 35 towers designed to withstand the winds of a Category 5 hurricane, which would be in excess of 156 miles per hour.

“This is just part of the investment we make for reliability,” Schulz said.

Not only does Verizon plan for the big stuff, but it also employs people like Andre Dunston to be a “test man.”

Instead of walking around in a geeky-looking uniform that an actor wears in Verizon TV commercials, Dunston drives around South Carolina in a specially equipped, unmarked white Chevrolet Tahoe.

In the back of the SUV, computers continuously make and receive cell phone calls.

Next to Dunston, a performance engineer with Verizon, two laptop computers sort data for reports on wireless service in Columbia.

The tests Dunston, of Charlotte, performs help company engineers determine where trouble spots might be in the local calling area or where a little tweaking of an antenna might help. The tests also provide information about the quality of competitors’ service.

As essential as cell phones have become in day-to-day communications, they’re just one tool used by the state’s Emergency Management Division, which has the job of coordinating South Carolina’s response to storms and disasters, said spokesman Joe Farmer.

The state agency uses a number of communication devices including satellite phones and radios that operate on the 800 MHz frequency, Farmer said.

“We have a lot of backups,” Farmer said. “There’s no one way to reach everyone at one time, and there never was.”

At the same time, officials and even the wireless phone companies say people shouldn’t rely on using just a cell phone if a storm hits.

Power outages can knock out cell sites, and cell phone batteries can run down. It’s best to have a corded phone connected to a land line just in case.

Farmer said a battery-powered radio might be the best way to track the storm if high winds knock out power, downs TV towers and disrupts the Internet.

“A radio will play a long time on a couple of AA batteries,” Farmer said