US National Weather Service Suffered 'Catastrophic' Outage; Website Stopped Sending Forecasts, Warnings (miamiherald.com) 100
jo7hs2 quotes a report from Miami Herald: On a day when a blizzard is pasting Maine and Northern California faces a dire flooding threat, several of the National Weather Service's primary systems for sending out alerts to the public have failed. As of approximately 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time, products from the National Weather Service ceased disseminating over the internet, including forecasts, warnings and current conditions. The Weather Service's public-facing website, Weather.gov, has not posted updated information since the outage began. Ryan Hickman, chief technology officer for Allison House, a weather data provider, called the situation "catastrophic." Hickman said two core routers for transmitting information from the Weather Service offices out to satellites, which beam the information back to public service providers, had stopped working. Hickman added that another backup system known as the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN) was also not operating.
Slashdot reader jo7hs2 notes: "The systems are back up as of Monday evening."
Slashdot reader jo7hs2 notes: "The systems are back up as of Monday evening."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop (Score:4, Insightful)
Please Google the 'Dunning-Krugar Effect' and note that there's at least 12 years of documented history and video evidence of the weak spot in the spillway.
There's real engineering here and there's people working today that weren't there 12 years ago that may well have not known about the issues documented prior.
There's no conspiracy here you nutter.
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop (Score:5, Funny)
The neat thing about telling people about the 'Dunning-Krugar Effect' is its self feedback. A "low ability" individual thinks that he is "high ability". He is then sent to the Wikipedia article where he reads that "high ability" individuals underestimate their competence. Since he thinks he is "high ability" he figures "Ah! I have been underestimating my competence. I am even more competent than I thought."
Lovely!
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop (Score:4, Insightful)
In the situation you describe I would expect the shit-posting to intensify.
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peop (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, it has, it has.
Re: (Score:2)
It's "Dunning-Kruger", not "Dunning-Krugar". ;).
Thanks, it makes it easier to know which category you fall into
Re: (Score:2)
I see what you did there. Bravo, very subtle.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peo (Score:5, Informative)
Where do you get your news, infowars.com?
Funny you say that. While infowars wasn't reporting on it(until yesterdayish), sites like breitbart and very small media outlets were reporting about the dam being highly stressed and having a high chance of failure. This 3 days(you can find local CBS and Fox news stations having multiple articles on it) before the big media outlets were, and it was one of the top stories on /r/conspiracy on the 10th and 11 and how the MSM wasn't reporting on it at all. That the dam was over capacity and the chances of it failing were increasing by the hour. Lot of people were also left wondering why the media and officials dealing with the dam were saying "don't worry, everything is fine" at 12pm yesterday then suddenly issuing emergency statements at 5pm on the same day and evacuation orders and people "really needed to leave now." That was when the dam was overflowing on the emergency spillway already, and the primary spillway already had a gaping hole in it and the lake level was going up by 2ft/hr.
That of course meant the highways were suddenly packed with people trying to get out of the evacuation zones. Instead of say starting voluntary evacuations on the 10th, and then staggered evacuations on the 11th. It's not out of the danger zone by any stretch right now. There's no way they're going to lower the water level by 50ft by today/tomorrow and depending on how the incoming storm tracks they could see another 2-4' water rise. The entire thing reeks of either political individuals leaning on the team overseeing the dam because they didn't want to create a panic. Or a level of incompetence so staggering that it wasn't until a bunch of engineers marched up and said: "If you don't order evacuations, we'll go to the press right now."
Re: Spillway was damaged with a bomb, wake up peo (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but monkeys made it to space first. And they got the hairless apes to do all the hard work.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The uncertainty is killing us. Since there's nobody with a reputation worth destroying left, us boys down in the basement are fearing for our jobs. Maybe we get some new positions in journalism, I heard they're looking for a few imaginative people to come up with news.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Lot of people were also left wondering why the media and officials dealing with the dam were saying "don't worry, everything is fine" at 12pm yesterday then suddenly issuing emergency statements at 5pm on the same day and evacuation orders and people "really needed to leave now."
While not knowing the specifics I can provide some insight into how it typically works in engineering when there is a problem.
1. Someone raises the problem.
2. A meeting is stood up with a whole lot of heads in the room. Some will be new and recommend immediate evac. Some will have been there for 30 years and it wasn't as f'n bad as that event back in 80 and it survived just fine back then.
3. Engineers will do some actual engineering and will come up with an answer based on a large degree of uncertainty due
Re: (Score:2)
The way he talks, he IS infowars. Seriously listen to the owner of infowars talk sometime. The man belongs in a straitjacket for his own protection.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Trump must be a ... nut for speaking...
CNN is generally sensational clickbait, but it's not terribly biased. You'll find a lot of people here read something more reasonable than CNN/Fox News.
Re: (Score:3)
Knowing how not to pay taxes legally is not a crime. We should celebrate it, because it is the proof that the IRS and Congress needs to re-write bit's of the tax code so that everyone pays the a proportion.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, tell him there's still that unpaid bill for the dinner banquet he had a while ago with his buddies, and it's kinda hard to get a hold of him. Should I send it to the Vatikan? I heard his successor is sitting there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're Jesus, you've probably already been shoved south of the border by now.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It almost does. There's the basis of a decent movie plot in there.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
According to Rick Santorum (R, Accuweather), publicly-funded weather services should only be "switched on" when there's an emergency.
Look out the window (Score:1)
Catastrophic? (Score:1)
Also, it's amazing how many "catastrophic" network events are over and gone before lots of people even noticed they happened.
I'm not sure that word means what they think it does.
So what's the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't most people consider weather forecasts "fake news" anyway?
Prophets of God (Score:2)
If it keeps on rainin' levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin' levee's goin' to break
When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moanâ¦
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Where is the disclosure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any possible justification for withholding full details of the failure, in the public interest? If a bridge had collapsed instead, would it be possible to withhold details? Is it OK for this to just happen again at some random time?
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm...
Do they need to disclose this? It is a private company. Sure the information is really important sometimes, but it's still a private service.
If Facebook says fuck off, we are going down for a couple hours for maintenance, are they required to forewarn us? No, that's silly, they can do whatever they please.
If CNN doesn't cover a "terrorist attack", are they required to apologize (not apologies you fuckwits at DOE) and forced to cover it? No, that's silly, they can do whatever they please.
If FoxNews spr
Re: Where is the disclosure? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
National Weather Service [wikipedia.org] - their website weather.gov [weather.gov]
The Weather Channel [wikipedia.org] - their website weather.com [weather.com]
Please learn the difference and which one the article is about.
Re: (Score:2)
Like everything else in this country it was built using sub par materials and cheapened up during construction. The ancient Romans built aqua ducts and roads that are still traveled on today. The USA can't pour concrete that lasts half a century.
Re: Where is the disclosure? (Score:2)
Blame the anti-intellectual Europeans who forget how everything worked in their quest for a Catholic idiocracy.
http://www.history.com/news/th... [history.com]
Re: To be clear (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I missed that bit. Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
To be further clear, The Weather Channel has absolutely nothing to do with the National Weather Service other than they both provide weather forecasts. The Weather Channel wasn't even mentioned in any of the articles.
It was probably just (Score:1)
the Ruskies yanking on Trump's chain, reminding him who's boss.
It's about time (Score:3)
DO NOT TOUCH THAT BUTTON !!! (Score:2)
At least we know that the new Trump guy arrived.
The Canadian Invasion (Score:1)
Told you not to remove the climate change data (Score:1)
But, no, you said, it's safe you said.
Right.
Sure.
Or did they just lose their funding? (Score:2)
The right attitude (Score:2)
Once I was flying to southern California. Before my plane could take off, it had to sit at the originating airport for about an hour. There was a power failure in southern California, and because of the power outage, the airports there couldn't accept incoming planes. I don't know the details, but apparently not only some primary power equipment failed, but also both backup systems failed.
Regarding the weather website:
Hickman said two core routers for transmitting information from the Weather Service offices out to satellites, which beam the information back to public service providers, had stopped working. "There is a primary and a backup and both have failed," Hickman said. .
. .
Hickman added that another backup system known as the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN) was also not operating.
The article also states that they were doing "dissemination upgrades", and that in about a