While some might argue that Hurricane Irene was overhyped, at least in the New York City area, one thing is clear: New York City wasn't ready for it. The good news is, Irene can serve as a warning so that next time, New York and other cities can do better.
"First, find out if you live in a hurricane evacuation zone," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Thursday. "You can do this by going on the City’s website, nyc.gov and typing in your address." It must have been gratifying that so many people did indeed do so, but the result is that the website crashed on Friday, even before the hurricane arrived, after sluggish performance Thursday, reported the Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg said on Friday that the website was seeing three times its average traffic, and on Thursday had received 4.3 million hits, over the previous record of 2.6 million hits during blizzard season on January 26. He went on to recommend that people having trouble using the site use the government's Twitter feeds, @nycmayorsoffice and @notifynyc.
Unfortunately, now that the hurricane is over, Bloomberg is saying he was satisfied with the preparation, and didn't cite any changes or improvements the city was going to make for future emergencies, though he noted nyc.gov could now be used for damage reports as well.
Other sites that provided useful information on the hurricane included Google, which announced its Crisis Response project, starting with New York; the New York Times, with its overall damage map; and a Twitter feed purportedly from Hurricane Irene herself, which ironically had some of the most up-to-date data.
Hopefully, New York City and others can learn from this, including such factors as the following:
- Figure out what the choke point was -- processing power? i/o? -- for the nyc.gov website, and make provisions for adding to that in a crisis situation. As experts have said, a downed website is itself a disaster.
- Design future websites to take up as little bandwidth as possible.
- And by the way, make sure the servers for the emergency website aren't located in a danger zone.
