Athena—the season's first major winter storm—is just beginning to hit New York City. This is bad news—the situation is still pretty rough for many residents. Hurricane Sandy really wreaked havoc in the city; here's a collection of the most astounding before and after comparisons.
All the damage to the communications infrastructure brought on by Hurricane Sandy is sure giving the people who keep track of the technical underpinnings of the Internet a lot of fodder to see how well things do and don’t work in real-world situations.
The folks at Renesys, the market research firm that keeps constant tabs on the health and operations of the Internet, watched networks in and around New York fail in real time as the hurricane swept across the region.
You’ll remember that the fundamental design principle of the Internet is that it routes traffic around failure automatically — supposedly, the legend goes, to enable it to keep running after a nuclear war. Well, the folks at Renesys watched that happen in real time, too. In its latest corporate blog post, it shows via a handful of colorful graphics how the traffic that would normally have run through New York took a different route, say from Paris to Washington D.C., or via Dallas to Palo Alto to get to India.
Instagram is all grown up. Not just because it now has a big, publicly-traded parent company. Nor am I referring to its unprecedentedly rapid user growth or new Web-based user profiles. In just the last few weeks, something significant has happened. Instagram became a mainstream social network, checked by everyday users during major news events and embraced by media outlets who previously weren't sure what to make of it.
We saw it in countless movies, but the reality is grittier and more miserable than any overblown disaster flick. Smudge everywhere, small hills of dead rats, stairs that descent into tunnels full of filthy water… New York City flooded after Sandy is a dreadful place.
SMvideoChan created this time-lapse video that captures Hurricane Sandy rolling in over New York City at 30s per frame. It starts around 1 PM on Sunday October 28 and ends around 2:30 PM on Tuesday October 30, 2012. Jalopnik reports that the camera was mounted on top of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud building.
To find a Red Cross shelter, people can download the Red Cross Hurricane app, visit the Red Cross web site , call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767.)”
People can also register on the Red Cross Safe and Well website, a secure and easy-to-use online tool that helps families connect during emergencies. To register, visit www.redcross.org or call 1-800-RED-CROSS (1-800-733-2767). This site also connects with the Twitter and Facebook accounts of users.
The Northeast is beginning to pick up the pieces of Hurricane Sandy, which raced through the area on Monday night, causing millions of customers to lose power, historic flooding and fires.
As of Tuesday morning, much of the water has receded, but there are risks of further high tides to come today, and the ongoing damage is going to be enormous.
As you know, there’s a big storm brewing on the East Coast. Luckily, the Internet has sprung into action with some great resources.
Google has a fantastic program that prepares the world for major events involving Mother Nature, and it has set up a crisis map for people on the East Coast preparing for Hurricane Sandy.
