I mean Waffle House closures are how FEMA tracks hurricane damaged communities in Florida. Now we just need to figure out how to use Denny's to show how much of California is burnt down.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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That’s true in a lot if places, and that’s partly due to the way FEMA is organized and integrated across multiple states.
With no working outage tracker from the Houston area’s main electricity provider
That, however, is some bullshit.
That, however, is some bullshit.
Looks like they rolled out their new tracker last night. It's available here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420
I can understand a self hosted tracker being down after a major weather event but their original Outage Tracker went down in May during the derecho storm so the real bullshit it's taken them until now to get it up again. There's no reason that a self-hosted web page should be down for over 30 days.
The new version is Cloud Hosted so it shouldn't happen again but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
It would seem the reason is they don’t want people to see the outages. Not fixing the site is a decision. A large number of people reading these posts could likely do it in a short amount of time.
Replace dennys with In N out. I haven’t even seen a Denny’s in ages but there’s an in n out in every town
That was my first thought, but they're not open 24/7.
I lived in Houston during hurricane ike back in like 2008 or whatever, and it wasn’t a super strong storm or anything, but power was out for over a week where I was in Pasadena. My downstairs neighbor and I built a bonfire on our apartment sidewalk to cook up all the freezer/fridge stuff that was thawing or going bad, and invited everyone around to partake. The cops showed up because of the fire, saw it was contained, told us to be careful, took an offered beer, and shot the shit for 20 min.
I remember going with the neighbors to get bottled water, I’m still not really sure how they heard about it, and it was an all day event to stand around in a shade-free line waiting for the tiny aid package. Fruit, bread, and a case of water. Not like we had anything else to do, but still.
Frankly I don’t blame people for getting power where they can. Utilities there really are absolute nonsense. And with smart phones being a literal lifesaver now, in addition to just providing -something- to do while power is out, I am not actually terribly surprised.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Want to find a working gas station, a place to eat or someplace with air-conditioning in East Texas after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions on Monday?
Users on Houston-area Facebook pages and group chats have suggested checking Whataburger’s online map to see which locations of the homegrown fast-food chain are open.
“You shouldn’t have to resort to a fast-food restaurant app to get information about power,” said Michelle Thibodeaux, who manages Airbnb properties on Galveston Island south of Houston.
The utility said that its outage map was offline because of technical issues stemming from the May storm that brought destructive winds and heavy rain to Houston.
Whataburger restaurants are typically open 24 hours a day, and the 164 branches in the Houston area are represented on the chain’s map by an orange-and-white W that’s familiar all across the South.
Houston’s Office of Emergency Management is “aware of the viral image” of Whataburger’s map being shared, said Brent Taylor, a spokesman, but the agency is not using it to make operational decisions.
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