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How Tech Companies Responded To Hurricane Florence (qz.com) 79

Posted by EditorDavid from the dotcom-after-the-story dept.
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..."
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How Tech Companies Responded To Hurricane Florence More

How Tech Companies Responded To Hurricane Florence

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  • 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?

    • more important question is whether government agencies (local, state, federal, ...), and taxpayer supported (tax credit, subsidies, etc) entities, should have information

      What good is the government having information if the #1 guy in charge doesn't believe it?

      https://www.vox.com/policy-and... [vox.com]

  • https://corporate.comcast.com/stories/comcast-opens-wifi-hotspots-to-aid-residents-and-emergency-personnel-ahead-of-hurricane-florence

  • 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 ?

    • Re:Gas station out of power? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday September 16, 2018 @07:41AM (#57322836)

      Many but not all states require some backup power system. Many gas stations in the USA are quite small businesses, franchises, that run on very narrow margins. Maintaining and testing such a system to be able to rely on it for extended systems can be difficult.

      I've recently had discussions with several business partners about what genuine "high availability" means, and walking with them through the risks of single points of failure, versus the risks of the complex and often confusing systems required to _avoid_ those single points of failure. I'm afraid that it's quite common to build almost all of the emergency or failover infrastructure, and leave out one small aspect. One of my favorite such mistakes is switches that have dual power supplies, for which both supplies are plugged into the same battery power supply. Another is where computers support dual network ports, and both are plugged into the same network switch.

      • I remember dealing with Southwestern Bell in the 90s. Their idea of "redundant circuit" was two wires in the same conduit. Guess how we discovered this?

      • I was in IT for a company that was upgrading to an IBM AS/400 mini-computer, with a brand new computer room. Our boss believed in doings things right, and we had a UPS which was specced out for more power than we'd need, with plenty of time for either an orderly shutdown, or for the length of the blackout.

        Fortunately, the first blackout only lasted about twenty minutes. This was a short enough time that we kept running, but long enough to realize that the system console terminal - necessary to shut the com

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      If the hurricane knocked over a tree that crashed down on top of the generator then it doesn't really matter how much diesel is left in the tank, even TRYING to turn that generator on is a no-no.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      For the US many gas stations do exactly that, especially on the interstates.
      I don't know if it's a requirement within the city but it is often the case.

      The issue is for areas not within the evacuation zone where people buy up all of the gas in preparation or after being displaced there, and refueling supplies are cut off.

      For smaller gas stations they don't always have room for huge generators and rely on the normal fuel reserves of the station. Once that is gone it's gone.

      Like I said I'm not sure of the of

    • EU has no such laws.
      Individual countries might have, but certainly not Germany.

      A storm that kills the power supply in a region big enough to be of concern has yet to be invented.

  • How tech companies respond? Who cares. What we care about is how do Nerds respond to a Hurricane.

    What hurricane are you talking about??

    .....WTF!!? why did the lights just go out?!. The Wi-Fi on the laptop is down. 17% power on the phone I can't hotspot for more than 10 minutes............runs around the house looking for a charged USB battery pack..............Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUUUCCCCCKKKK! What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? AAAAAAAAAAA SOMBODY HEEEEEELLLL

  • Let's hope... (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday September 16, 2018 @09:38AM (#57323132)

    ...they moved their UPS and Generators from the cellar to the roof after Sandy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      ...they moved their UPS and Generators from the cellar to the roof after Sandy.

      Building codes often make it impractical to install generators where they would be the most resilient.

  • Has responded by offering 10 day prime shipping in VA with no explanation at all - on in-stock prime items.

  • Death and damage toll pretty typical for a hurricane that reaches U.S. shore.

    *yawn*

  • 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?

  • 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.

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