Google Adds Power Outage Information To Its Hurricane Sandy Crisis Map
As we brought to your attention last night, Google set up what it calls a “Crisis Map” as we waited for Hurricane Sandy to make land-fall. It has, and damage has been done, including massive power outages in all affected areas.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google stood up its Hurricane Sandy Crisis Map the night before landfall, and within a day of the storm hitting it has bolted on a new layer: power outage information, aimed at the massive outages now spanning every affected area. The story traveled unusually widely for a map feature — pickups on October 30 ranged from Poynter and CBS News to Twitter's own resources post and Data Center Knowledge's report on Northeast data centers bracing for the storm, which says something about how many audiences suddenly needed storm information infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Residents and responders in the blackout zones get a single map view of where power is out, turning scattered utility reports into one lookup during the most acute hours of the storm.
Second-order effects
- Other platforms are being pulled into the same role in real time — Twitter published its own Sandy resources page the same day — making crisis information a competitive surface between Google, Twitter, and newsrooms rather than a government-only function.
Third-order effects
- If each major storm adds another data layer to these maps, consumer web platforms harden into standing emergency-information infrastructure, with expectations — and scrutiny — that follow whenever the next disaster hits.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are absorbing emergency-response functions storm by storm, with each disaster adding a new data layer to what search and maps are expected to deliver.