Internet Plays Crucial Role in Hurricane Tracking
As Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, countless people -- in the storm’s path and around the world -- turned to the Internet for up-to-the-minute news and information. As the historic storm came ashore Mon., media outlets braced for the worst -- and used the Internet as a bullhorn.
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New Orleans area TV stations helped Web surfers track the storm but some approaches seemed fresher than others. NBC affiliate WDSU-TV posted an image slideshow, a live video stream and a frequently updated blog by newsroom staffers at the studio and on location around the region. WGNO-TV, an ABC affiliate, maintained a list of sources for sandbags, citywide closures, an evacuation map and the standard array of radar and satellite images. Even the city’s WB station, WNOL-TV, which doesn’t air original news programming, posted storm information on its homepage.
By most accounts, CBS’s WWL-TV led the pack at online coverage. The station touted online video and audio streams -- for high- and low-bandwidth users -- plus a breaking news banner on its homepage detailing levee breaches, rising water and power outages. A special section, “Interactive Katrina,” invited visitors to send photos and weather updates. WWL’s online weather forum presented perspectives from 2 cadres -- users providing localized, on-the-ground updates and displaced residents seeking news of the neighborhoods they abandoned. NOLA.com, a popular local news and information hub, offered content from WGNO-TV and the city’s lone daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune. As part of its comprehensive coverage, the site compiled watches, warnings, webcams and image galleries.
Biloxi-based news sites provided an additional, if intermittent, information stream. Coping with substantial damage to its roof, ABC affiliate WLOX-TV relied on coverage from sister stations Mon. The station’s website, which stayed online, offered a toolkit for coping with Katrina. The daily Sun-Herald tracked the storm on its homepage with radar and satellite images, maintaining a lively blog. Amid sporadic power outages, blog managers updated storm news, posted public safety notices and offered newsroom staff observations. The site also was a sounding board for people from as far away as Cal. who had lost touch with relatives caught in the storm.
Stormtrack.org’s message board was a favored hurricane watcher destination. Hundreds of people simultaneously browsed and posted on the forum as the hurricane ran its course, site administrator Rob Davis said. Many weren’t even members of the board, which usually is closed to the public, Davis told us. Although countless visitors logged on simply to get information, many others did so to share breaking news and storm data. “What you have are at least 100 people watching hundreds of sources, then immediately sharing any developments they find,” he said. Davis was monitoring 3 TV stations, watching 6 area webcams, listening to reports relayed on ham radio and reading user reports on his site. At least 8 members of Stormtrack.org’s board maintained watch at hot zones along the Gulf Coast, posting reports as possible.
Two sections of professional storm chaser Albert Pietrycha’s site received a flurry of clicks. One page overlays radar data with land, buoy and ship observations to create a map that lets researchers pinpoint a storm’s eye. The page is updated every 15 min., the severe storm research meteorologist told us. The 2nd page, for the meteorologically savvy, provides statistics -- from strike probabilities and new warnings to wind speed and surface maps -- without having to winnow the Web’s contents for pertinent information.
Meteorologists at AWS, with the world’s largest weather sensor network, spent the weekend preparing for the storm. Best known for its downloadable WeatherBug application, the firm Mon. launched a mobile chat function devoted to Katrina, giving mobile device users a chance to correspond in real time with AWS experts. AWS expected a barrage of inquiries about the storm’s path and predictions of its impact, a spokeswoman said. AWS counts millions among its active user community who submit photos, videos and stories to the WeatherBug site daily, she said. AWS operated similarly during Hurricanes Dennis and Emily.
Govt. sites dished up substantial data for seekers of no frills storm coverage. The National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) posted advisories, forecasts and position estimates plus RSS feeds. The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Tracker site had satellite imagery, wind speed forecasts and more. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) homepage prominently announced that response teams, generators, water, food and other emergency commodities had been moved into the region, but referred users to NHC’s site for hurricane tracking information.
At Stormtracker.org, message board users debated whether Katrina’s punch had matched predictions. At press time, most (75%) respondents to a site poll said the storm had lived up to its billing, while 10% disagreed and 14% weren’t sure. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered evacuation of nearly 500,000 citizens over the weekend; about 9,000 refugees huddled at the city’s Superdome sports arena. -- Andrew Noyes
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The cable companies say they're unlikely to know how many customers lack broadband service for several days. A full restoration of broadband and other services may take much longer. “We really have a long-term, as opposed to a short-term, problem that we're dealing with,” said Jim Hannan, vp-engineering for Washington Post Co.’s Cable One. As of 2 p.m. Mon. in Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., “there is not a single modem that’s online now, and that generally indicates power” problems, Hannan said: “We know that just about every modem we have is down… We're communicating a little bit with the people in town, but it appears the mobile towers are going down.”
About half of Cox Communications customers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans are without broadband service, the firm’s spokesman said. About half of VoIP phone customers are without service in Baton Rouge, he said.
Small ISPs were also hit hard by the storm. CrawfishNet, based 250 miles west of where Katrina hit landfall, was dark much of the day. A spokesman told us the company’s T1 connection, which powers practically all its consumer services, was knocked out. A CenturyTel representative said its customers were experiencing “connectivity issues, mainly slow speeds” throughout South Central and Southeastern portions of the U.S. Phone and e-mail inquiries to I-55, an ISP based in Hammond, La., were unsuccessful.