[Hidden-tech] How to get news in a power outage

[Chris Hoogendyk]

On 11/1/11 8:21 AM, Marcia Yudkin wrote:
> We got our power back in Goshen last night after 48 hours out.  Our landline was out as well.  All we had for getting news about when we might get power back were my smartphone and a good battery-powered radio.
>
> The radio was not as useful as I expected, however, because none of the stations I knew of had good, specific, timely information.  WFCR, which is what I usually listen to, was practically useless.  While memories are fresh, did anyone get specific outage-related information from any local radio station?
>
> On my smartphone, I can go to the web but since this eats up the cell phone battery much faster than just checking email, I don't want to waste time going to sites that aren't mobile-friendly or don't have updated info.  Yesterday, Monday, Gazettenet.com had only a storm-related article from Sunday, which obviously wasn't current.  Did anyone have a better source of mobile-friendly local updates on the web?
>
> Thanks for your advice - I will file it away (off my computer) for next time.

Unfortunately, in a breakdown of electrical systems, networks, & services such as we have 
experienced in this event, the newfangled stuff fails. We had no electricity, no internet, no land 
line (ours is VoIP over our internet), no radio, . . . .  The only thing I had was my cell phone, 
which is a traditional cell phone, not a "smart phone."

We got power back at UMass Sunday morning at 7:30am, because UMass has its own power generating 
station. I went in to work Sunday and got the servers back in shape. But I couldn't find any 
information on what was going on with power on the web or google news.

UMass has an emergency alert system that sends robo calls and text messages to my cell phone, to my 
work phone, and emails to both my home and work. However, it is an out sourced emergency alert 
system, and it apparently failed along with everything else. I never got a notice of the major power 
outage.

Later in the day, Sunday, I got messages from UMass directly advising of their status.

My VoIP goes through EarthLink TrueVoice. When my phone is unreachable, messages get converted to 
.wav files and attached to emails to my work address. So, by going to work I could pick up my voice 
mail. People who have traditional telephone land lines would have gotten those directly, although if 
they had traditional answering machines, they would have had to actually pick up the phone to get 
the messages. Those messages can then be transmitted to neighbors by word of mouth. And, it is those 
messages that turned out to be the only source of information.

In Amherst, the Town Manager sent out robo calls to registered residents advising them of the status 
of the emergency. There have been several of those over the course of the last couple of days. The 
School System in Springfield (where my wife works) sent out robo messages advising about the school 
closings. And, this morning, Northeast Utilities sent out a robo call to customers indicating 
timelines for repairs. They broke it down by broad regions as Greenfield, Hadley and Springfield. 
I'm assuming Amherst was lumped in with Hadley. They indicated that we would be seeing side street 
repairs completed by Thursday. They said that the harder hit areas of Springfield would be Friday or 
Saturday. They said they had 120 line crews and 90 tree crews out in the field. In the first day or 
so it was hard to have solid details on completion dates, but as they got more into the work, they 
had more data to go on.

It is disappointing that wfcr was offline for a while, the Gazette was unable to publish any more 
than a thin section of disaster reporting on Monday, and you couldn't just tune in and get updates.

When I called the power outage 800 number on Saturday night, all lines were busy. I was ultimately 
able to record a message, but clearly they were being hit by so much all at once that it was 
impossible for them to provide personal answers to anything. If they had, it would have been some 
pablum like, Wow, this is terrible, we're really swamped, we'll do the best we can as soon as we 
can. And that wouldn't be much use. The power company managers, campus managers, and town managers 
are the ones who will eventually get information and try to pass it along to us. In this kind of 
disaster, I don't think there's much else you can do. It's possible that you could call the power 
company now and things would be sufficiently nailed down that they could give you information about 
your neighborhood.

We're really really lucky that this didn't happen together with a real cold snap. Think how much 
worse it might have been with frozen pipes, hypothermia, etc.

Maybe someone in hidden tech will come up with the next innovation in self repairing, peer to peer, 
social network, information devices that will somehow evade this kind of breakdown. Then, when the 
next disaster like this comes along, there will be a different answer.


-- 
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Chris Hoogendyk

-
    O__  ---- Systems Administrator
   c/ /'_ --- Biology&  Geology Departments
  (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4