When the tree crashed through the porch roof during Superstorm Sandy, I did what you might expect. I grabbed my cellphone, intent on sharing the news on social media. But no tweets or status updates ushered forth from suburban New York City during or after the near hurricane earlier this week.
The night Sandy ravaged the US Northeast Coast was the night big-data died -- at least for a lot of the storm's victims. As the wind roared, we rediscovered the sounds of silence.
It's hard to tweet when cellphones stop working. And, according to the Federal Communications Commission, the storm disrupted or damaged 25 percent of cell towers in 10 states.
Sandy entered the area as a Category 1 hurricane but was downgraded shortly before making landfall Monday night. Call it what you will, the storm packed a powerful punch.
An estimated 7 million people, including me, lost power. No power means no Internet. But the communications problems haven't been limited to those left in the dark.
My Verizon Fios line, which supplies my home Internet access, snapped before the electric lines. It now hangs limply on the side of my house, where it will likely remain out of service for days to come.
I don't know precisely how many other Verizon customers lost service. But from the number of Verizon repair crews in my area alone, I can estimate quite a few.
Cable subscribers haven't fared well either. About 25 percent of cable services -- the other big source of Internet connectivity -- reportedly went down, too.
In this age of big-data, the isolation of living with no phone, no texts, no social media, and no Web access is downright unnerving. And it's not over yet: Storm surge advisories are in effect through tomorrow.
In a statement yesterday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski noted that Sandy "was, and remains, a devastating storm."
Overall, the condition of our communications networks is improving, but serious outages remain, particularly in New York, New Jersey, and other hard-hit areas… In the days and weeks ahead, we will continue to expect the unexpected as the full picture of Hurricane Sandy's impact on communications networks develops. The crisis is not over.
Genachowski further warned that communications outages could get worse before they get better, particularly for mobile networks, because of the flooding and loss of power.
Many wireless carriers were slammed, including Verizon, which still had a couple feet of water in its Manhattan headquarters two days afterward. The damage was so severe, TechCrunch reported, that some carriers asked customers to use social networks like Twitter to take the load off cell networks.
For many, big-data would, in fact, live on. While social media took a punch from the storm, they remained a big source of information. Reports indicate people worldwide got a sense of events happening in the storm in real-time, thanks to those who were still able to access social media services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
The social analytics firm Topsy reported nearly 3.5 million tweets with the hashtag #sandy in the 24 hours after the storm hit. According to Mashable, Instagram users posted 10 Hurricane Sandy photos per second. Photos coming in at 60 a minute and 3,600 per hour provided more than 86,000 images in a 24-hour period. Facebook reported that the 10 words and phrases used during the height of the storm were all Sandy related, including hurricane, stay safe, be safe, and storm.
During previous national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, there was no Twitter or Instragram that put breaking news in the hands of civilians. People around the world had to wait patiently by their TVs and computers for the latest images of New Orleans completely underwater, or devastating earthquake damage in Haiti. Despite widespread Internet use and the growing use of smartphones, news still wasn't quite instant.
[Tuesday] in the face of one of the biggest natural disasters to hit the East Coast, people took pictures, shot videos, sent tweets, and posted to Facebook, all in real time.
Even though some of us lost our voices, big-data still made a lot of noise during the storm.
The problem with social media during an emergency is that the information is unfiltered and unverified. That can create unnecessary panic, although I concede the immediacy is amazing. How can we strike a balance?
Good point. And while we assume a photo is authentic, what if someone is trying to create panic or unrest, and a photoshopped image goes viral during a crisis? There are a lot of repercussions to think about.
I'm glad you're safe! But in disasters, Big Data becomes even more important. During normal operational hours, Big Data provides interesting customer data from a business perspective. In emergencies, Big Data becomes a leading indicator of showing where outages and equipment failures may be affecting service or coverage, especially if the connection isn't completely obvious.
For instance, in a central office where a pool of phone numbers may be supported, all of those numbers will go down if the central office is out of service and disaster recovery fails. Once that central office is back up and running, there may still be specific switches or circuits that are down and impairing service. By checking Big Data quickly and comparing call throughout and termination both to theoretical maximums and historical data, phone companies can troubleshoot more quickly and hopefully get us all up and running more quickly.
@Noreen, I second @Hyoun Park, saying, "I'm glad you're safe!" But you've got me thinking, what would I do in a similar circumstance? Would I immediately reach for my smartphone so I could share on social media that my house had suffered damage (but, presumably, that I'm OK)? I'd have to say that wouldn't be my first reaction -- unless, I guess, I'd told loved ones that that's how I'd be communicating during the event. Maybe you're lucky you weren't actually able to get out your tweet -- I can imagine hearing about unscrupulous individuals trolling tweets for storm victims to take advantage of. "Need your roof fixed? Have we got a deal for you!"
@Noreen: Here in PA, I was far enough inland that I didn't experience much disruption. As I rolled to work Tuesday morning, I listened to reports of coastal damage on NPR. With two brothers on the coast, one in Jersey and one in Delaware, I wanted to know all was well. With power and cell communications limited, it was hard to know, but we eventually did hear from both that they are fine.
So I came into work and dabbled on Yahoo! News a little. One of the first stories I saw was an article titled something to the effect of "10 Bogus Images of Sandy You're Proliferating Right Now". The story was about a number of images, some painfully obviously photoshopped, that people were tweeting, facebooking and instagramming. Sharks swimming in the streets, storm clouds rolling over Manhattan, and my favorite, a screengrab of the Statue of Liberty getting overtaken by tsunami-sized waves, straight out of the move 'The Day After Tomorrow'.
Social media has become a powerful element for communication in the past three years, forcing even the most staid new organizations to change the way they do business. It has exposed the atrocities and destruction of the Arab Spring, and broken hearts through images of personal tragedies that otherwise would never have had a broad, let alone international audience. The power of social media also blesses us with a conundrum of equally revolutionary proportions -- what, if anything, can be done about the bogus stuff that people take as fact and run with.
@Noreen I was also hit by the storm. Though we sustained no real damage on my block, we, like the places all around us, lost power on Monday. It was only restored to my block late last night. Cell phone coverage remained spotty for quite a while. And without access to the internet, we had to resort to the really old-fashioned method of getting news -- listening to the radio -- which featured far more updates on Manhattan than my neighborhood.
@mnorth, What I wonder is this: Has the abundance of Johnny-on-the-spot pics blasted out onto the social Web instantaneously translated into increased donations for Red Cross and other service organizations helping in disaster relief? Other than as a way to convey your own personal safety to friends and family, I think that would be one of the most significant uses of social media during such troubled times.
While some people may give faster, I think others will use the instant media as opportunities to take - by building scams around some of the most heartbreaking photos.
@Noreen -- no change there, except for speed at which scammers can find and prey on their victims. Disasters always bring out the best and worst of people.
Investment scams and charity fraud crop up after every disaster. But Hurricane Sandy is the first U.S. catastrophe in the social-media age.
"We are in uncharted territory," says Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago securities attorney. "And social media has expanded the tentacles of scamsters exponentially."
During the storm last night, user @comfortablysmug was the source of a load of frightening but false information about conditions in New York City that spread wildly on Twitter and onto news broadcasts before ConEd, the MTA, and Wall Street sources had to take time out of the crisis situation to refute them.
What leads a person to do such a thing, which his critics have likened to shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater? It's unclear. But perhaps it has something to do with the nature of anonymity. If there are no consequences for posting false "BREAKING" news, there's an incentive to do it to an accumulate a large audience.
In the event of a disastor, it's a good idea if you have service from a local phone company to have a simple landline phone with a cord that will function if the power should go out. (Since mine is through my cable company, I'll be out of luck.)
Noreen writes Even though some of us lost our voices, big-data still made a lot of noise during the storm
Noreen, glad to learn that you and Airella game through this dangerous event alive, although somewhat battered.
Twitter and text-messaging apparently were a major news source during Sandy, according to news reports. Somehow people managed to have cellphone connections even when their electricity and normal Internet connections failed.
If 25percent of the cell towers went down, we can presume that some people lost service but that others were just fine. How many people lost service is hard to estimate: it would depend on which towers went down and how much of the service they actually provided in a given area
Noreen writes If 25percent of the cell towers went down, we can presume that some people lost service but that others were just fine. How many people lost service is hard to estimate: it would depend on which towers went down and how much of the service they actually provided in a given area
Relevant to this is an article a couple of days ago in Huffington Post:
Some excerpts of interest: One key factor helps explain why communities ravaged by Hurricane Sandy could not use cell phones to call for help and communicate with the outside world: mobile telephone companies have for years lobbied to kill rules that would have forced them to maintain backup power at their cell phone towers.
After Hurricane Katrina knocked out communications along the Gulf Coast, federal regulators proposed that wireless companies have backup power at all cell towers.
But the wireless industry sued to block the requirement, saying it would be a financial burden and regulators didn't have authority to impose it. An appeals court later sided with the industry.
This week, as Sandy dealt a severe blow to the nation's most populous region, about one in four cell towers failed, leaving thousands of customers unable to make cell phone calls for days.
The outages exposed weaknesses in wireless communications during disasters and renewed questions of whether carriers should be required to make their networks more resilient.
Having adequate redundancy is always debatable, but it seems to me that, as the disastrous impacts of Global Warming become more evident, the "better safe than sorry" argument will start to win lots more public support.
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