"As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week. I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures-watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load. Once in a while, pages would finally load or partially load, and I could actually click a second or third link."
"When I was able to load some government and emergency sites, problems with loading speed and website content became very apparent. We tried to find out the situation with the highways on the government site that tracks road closures. I wasn't able to view the big slow loading interactive map and got a pop-up with an API failure message. I wish the main closures had been listed more simply, so I could have seen that the highway was completely closed by a landslide."
Hurricane Helene caused widespread flooding and prolonged power outages in Western North Carolina, and many cell towers were damaged, leaving people with little access to emergency information. Mobile web access was severely degraded the day after the storm and into the following week, with pages timing out, loading partially, or failing entirely. Essential government and emergency sites relied on slow interactive maps, heavy media like image sliders, and APIs that produced errors, preventing clear access to road-closure information. People drove to find pockets of service, and simple, low-bandwidth lists of critical closures would have been far more useful.
Read at Sparkbox
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