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How Tech Companies Responded To Hurricane Florence (qz.com)
112-mph winds from Hurricane Florence battered the Carolinas on Saturday, resulting in at least 13 deaths and leaving more than 796,000 households with no electricity, according to CNN, with over 20,000 people evacuating to emergency shelters.
One Myrtle Beach resident spotted an alligator walking through their neighborhood, and the New York Post warns the hurricane "could displace venomous snakes from South Carolina's wetlands," uprooting "some 38 species of snakes -- including dangerous cottonmouths and copperhead vipers."
Cellphone carriers are offering free calling, texting, and data services to affected customers in the Carolinas, and Quartz reports that other tech companies are also trying to help: People fleeing Florence can find hundreds of places on Airbnb to stay for free; the company will screen applicants and cover homeowners for any damage up to $1 million. Harmany is an app created specifically to connect people during natural disasters. It's set up so that people who have a place can list it, adding it to a map where those needing shelter can find them. Gas Buddy, which lets users search for gas prices and availability by zip code, has set up a special "Florence Live Updates" page and section on its app so users can identify which gas stations are out of fuel, diesel, or power....
The main federal disaster agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has an app that is supposed to provide up-to-the minute information about the storm, shelters, and evacuation routes. It is crashing constantly, according to Android users. (Quartz's didn't have the same problems, but hitting the "get directions" button to one North Carolina shelter inexplicably opened up Uber.) FEMA also recommends the Red Cross's Hurricane app, which shows location specific weather alerts, has a flashlight and an alarm, and allows users to connect with people in their contacts, but doesn't have information on shelters.
And the data backup company Datto is even deploying equipment for free to bring back critical infrastructure. "With this storm, it looks like flooding will be as much of a danger as wind. It doesn't take a lot of water to knock out infrastructure like cable and internet. Things that can take weeks to build it back..."
One Myrtle Beach resident spotted an alligator walking through their neighborhood, and the New York Post warns the hurricane "could displace venomous snakes from South Carolina's wetlands," uprooting "some 38 species of snakes -- including dangerous cottonmouths and copperhead vipers."
Cellphone carriers are offering free calling, texting, and data services to affected customers in the Carolinas, and Quartz reports that other tech companies are also trying to help: People fleeing Florence can find hundreds of places on Airbnb to stay for free; the company will screen applicants and cover homeowners for any damage up to $1 million. Harmany is an app created specifically to connect people during natural disasters. It's set up so that people who have a place can list it, adding it to a map where those needing shelter can find them. Gas Buddy, which lets users search for gas prices and availability by zip code, has set up a special "Florence Live Updates" page and section on its app so users can identify which gas stations are out of fuel, diesel, or power....
The main federal disaster agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has an app that is supposed to provide up-to-the minute information about the storm, shelters, and evacuation routes. It is crashing constantly, according to Android users. (Quartz's didn't have the same problems, but hitting the "get directions" button to one North Carolina shelter inexplicably opened up Uber.) FEMA also recommends the Red Cross's Hurricane app, which shows location specific weather alerts, has a flashlight and an alarm, and allows users to connect with people in their contacts, but doesn't have information on shelters.
And the data backup company Datto is even deploying equipment for free to bring back critical infrastructure. "With this storm, it looks like flooding will be as much of a danger as wind. It doesn't take a lot of water to knock out infrastructure like cable and internet. Things that can take weeks to build it back..."
"Tech companies" are not responding to the hurricane in any way that matters. Flashlight apps? Map and direction finding apps?
How many of them are donating supplies? How many are putting up people in housing? I mean, the cell carriers are almost doing something with free calling, but considering the bigger concern is having working cell towers (rather than paying for a few days of phone calls) it hardly counts.
What idiot approved this self-congratulatory fluff piece?
more important question is whether government agencies (local, state, federal, ...), and taxpayer supported (tax credit, subsidies, etc) entities, should have information and help delivery apps(also information collection apps), and other such things, in private corporate controlled platforms that can censor or ban users (for whatever reason)?
isn't that discrimination against citizens who are banned and censored? isn't that illegal?
His efforts were a yuge success. Just like Maria where there were only 18 deaths and anything more is a democrat conspiracy to discredit him. When we all know the credit goes to these tech companies and not to the government at all. He thinks throwing paper towels at people is all it takes.
Yep sounds like the third term of Barack Obama. Shadow government.
https://corporate.comcast.com/stories/comcast-opens-wifi-hotspots-to-aid-residents-and-emergency-personnel-ahead-of-hurricane-florence
This must be sarcasm. The current government is incomparable to that of Barack Obama, and what the bleep is this shadow government?
... neatly leaving people without a smartphone of the right brand out in the wet stormy cold.
Where I live, we don't have hurricanes. But you CANNOT open a gas station without installing a generator capable of powering the whole business, including lights, pumps and cash registers. The generator is expected to have a separate tank and to run on something that the gas station sells (usually diesel). The same AFAIK is in the whole EU and the whole post-Soviet world. Isn't it the same in US ?
I'm a happy man.
This series of articles is about technology, not about supplies.
AirBnb is covering the entire cost of lodging people.
Having an app, a website, and using computers for day to day operations doesn't make a company a tech company. If it were the case, then Walmart would be a huge tech company. And Home Depot.
With the mentality of everyone, I would suggest that Papa Johns move their HQ to Silly Valley, they would be then labeled a tech company (it uses quite a bit of tech itself!), its founder, John Schnatter, gets labeled as "Autistic" because of the use of the 'N' word and the company will be all good and its market cap will go to $1 trillion dollars. Oh! And throw in Elon Musk eating a pizza from there and all of you would be wetting yourselves.
It doesn't take a lot of water to knock out infrastructure like cable and internet. Things that can take weeks to build it back...
That's right, it does, so keep that in mind next time you all call the latter a "human right", or a "necessity". Apparently it's such a "necessity" it can't even be built like one.
He hates Peuro Rico but he's like Johnny-on-the-stop with this hurricane.
The media response to a hurricane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbjXJM8_qus
What hurricane are you talking about??
Lights flicker back on. 3 minutes later..........sigh.....damn it now I need to log back on.....5 minutes after he gets logged back in that they go back out again for good.
nerd curls up into the fetal position. Rescuers find him 45 minutes later after the neighbors call them due to the sounds of a little girl sobbing/wailing coming from the house.
...they moved their UPS and Generators from the cellar to the roof after Sandy.
Has responded by offering 10 day prime shipping in VA with no explanation at all - on in-stock prime items.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I'm form Argentina. The company I work from, we are using Azures's datacenter in Virginia (lower cost for us). Our manager was told by Microsoft to move all data to other datacenters in the west coast as a prevention any downtime happens, and we did. I guess we will be moving all back to Virginia when it is all over.
How many people have been killed by snakes or alligators during hurricanes? That really seems like a minor concern. Is this weather channel reporting?
Death and damage toll pretty typical for a hurricane that reaches U.S. shore.
*yawn*
That escalated quickly lol. Just because I misspelled this?
Fake News!! Fake News!! It's easy to keep believin' the lie when anything you don't like is fake news.
I've read reports that they don't stand behind their promise to make owners whole if a guest trashes the place. What would really make this an attractive offer would be if instead of offering more money, they actually paid what they agreed to.
But to be fair, I'll ask: has anybody had serious damage done by an Airbnb guest which the company actually did repair?
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Sacramento had a severe rain storm in the late 1990's that sent river levels to top of the levees. A news camera crew were recording the high water level at a pedestrian bridge when a salmon jumped out of the water, flopped across the bridge, and jumped back into the water. That was the highlight for the evening newscast since flooding was minimal, the levees didn't collapse and no one died from their own stupidity.
Datto makes some pretty nice stuff if you can get your customers to pay for it - hybrid onsite-offsite backup, with the ability to spin up a VM "in the cloud" with a VPN connection back to the in-office backup device so it looks like that server is actually still up and running in the office even if it's a bit slow.
I like that they're helping out in situations like this, though for most of what they can do you probably needed it up and running a week or two before the hurricane.
fencepost
just a little off
It's bitztream the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating, Slashdot editors-hating Slashdot troll!
That commie shit hole of an island left millions of dollars worth of supplies to rot in the piers and runways.
Fake news, nuf said.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Doh. News at 11. What headline do you want?
"Big thunderstorm doesn't stop raining halfway through. Americans surprised!"
"Big thunderstorm brings lots of rain as predicted. Americans surprised!"
"After lots of rain, houses in millenia-old floodplane flooded despite prayers for the contrary. Americans surprised!" In unrelated news: "Belief in prayers on the rise - Americans more faithful than ever before"
"Unprotected infrastructure damaged by predicted rainfall 57th year in a row. Americans surprised!"
"Lots of predicted rain lead to predicted flash floods in predicted places. Americans very surprised! 14 dead"
"Big truck is not magically invincible against force-of-nature flash flood. American owner mildly surprised! Also dead."
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