I’m watching the news as Hurricane Gustav has begun to hit the coast, and I wondered how much damage there has already been.
Using Google Earth, I was able to pull up a picture of it by turning on “Weather” under “Layers.”
Since I can pull up all of our customers’ vehicles within Google Earth, I can see where they are relative to the storm:
It’s obscuring my view of which vehicles are underneath it, so I can remove the clouds by unchecking them under Weather, and change the transparency of the radar image with the transparency slider:
Now I can better see which vehicles are in the storm right now:
Thankfully all of them except 2 or 3 have been stopped for more than an hour (we know this since they are red).
One on the outskirts is moving, and when I look at the time it reported vs. the time my map refreshed, it is within 2 minutes (typically, it takes 2-3 seconds to make it into our database, and our vehicles reoprt every 2 minutes):
This tells me that AT&T is still doing ok in terms of cell coverage. Once it’s over and hopefully there isn’t too much damage, we can run a quick analysis to determine if/when any of our vehicles were unable to communicate due to failures in the cell network. So far so good.
By zooming WAY down, we can actually look UP at the radar image of Hurricane Gustav — a pretty interesting view. Unfortunately, whoever is driving this vehicle has to see the real thing — I hope they are heading out of there.
I looked earlier today and an ambulance customer of our sent some ambulances to the area — hopefully everyone does ok.
Rob.
[ Update -- Gustav has dissipated to a tropical storm as of 9 PM PST.]
I ran a check against all customers’ vehicles which were driving in that area, and only one vehicle had any evidence of cell trouble with AT&T due to the Hurricane.
This screenshot shows a few things:
- the Hurricane above the area in question
- AT&T GPRS (Cell) coverage in orange on the ground (darker orange=better coverage)
- Many vehicles’ paths, with dots close to the ground indicating 2 minute reports, mostly received by GPS Insight within seconds
- The area in the red box shows pins “higher up” in the air, which indicates a delay from the time the measurement was taken and when it was received by us. This “lag” was up to 44 minutes, but all that data was eventually transmitted.
Most likely this “lag” was due to a single damaged cell tower in that area.
Earlier in the day at 8:32 AM, it only took 6 seconds for data to get to GPS Insight from that area. But during the hurricane, at 10:33 PM, there was apparently no cell signal available in that area, so the vehicle needed to drive roughly 34 minutes until it hit a working cell tower.
However, this is the ONLY instance of apparent damage in the cell infrastructure which affected any of our customers in that region, which is great to see. And it only lasted for 30-40 minutes.
This “lag” view is something we use internally to help customers troubleshoot their vehicles (by determining if problems coincide with known AT&T coverage limits) — today it helped to show that Gustav didn’t do much damage to the cell towers in that region, thankfully.