Hard on the heels of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and neighboring states a fortnight ago, Hurricane Milton last night took direct aim at Central Florida.
Communities across the Sunshine State today find themselves without electricity, water and other utilities. CNN is reporting that over three million customers are without power after the monstrous storm barreled across the state.
As we saw with communities impacted by Helene, access to basic information through cellular and other networks with diminished bandwidth became an increasing and essential need. Sadly, it has become a life-and-death need in the face of such huge natural disasters.
With Hurricane Milton’s landfall approaching, NPR launched a rapid-response effort on Wednesday to develop a solution that would help local member stations keep their communities connected and informed in the storm's aftermath.
The solution itself appears simple but was only possible on a platform that enables rapid development and deployment across a network of sites sharing the same infrastructure.
Text-only versions of local station sites were created within hours before Milton made landfall, stripped down to meet the essential needs of readers seeking critical information during and after a natural disaster, when digital connectivity is often severely limited.
Across a network of over 200 local stations running on NPR’s Grove CMS (powered by Brightspot), text-only homepages and news articles were deployed to offer low-bandwidth resources that could be accessed quickly and without delay.
One report from NiemanLab attests to the impact of yesterday's update: “This morning, loading the main WUSF.org homepage required 8.5 megabytes of bandwidth. The text-only page needed only 21.5 kilobytes. That’s a difference of about 400x,” the article states.
Yesterday afternoon, an announcement went out to all local stations about the availability of these new resources. Some examples can be seen at Southwest Florida’s WGCU text-only homepage or a similar version for KUT in Austin.
Fresh enhancements are following to support communities in need with news alert banners for the low-bandwidth version as well as live blog stories to keep readers updated with the latest news and reporting from the ground.
