My twitter feed is blowing up with people discussing Hurricane Sandy and its likely impact on the East Coast. In the interests of having somewhere useful to drop things that come up along the way, here's a live blog of sorts of the event. I'll put all of my Sandy stuff here, rather than have it go over multiple other entries. The top of this is collected info; the bottom is the blog collecting things without much sorting except chronological. Whenever possible, I'll point to things that work well on mobile phones where screen size and bandwidth are an issue.
Power outages
My power outage map collection is a good point of reference. It's organized by state, with phone numbers and twitter feeds for utility company news and information. It loads relatively slowly because of all of the graphics, so you'll want to bookmark your utility's pages and save their phone number before the storm hits.
On Twitter, I'm following a list @vielmetti/poweroutage with about 40 utility company feeds all in one place.
Weather maps and forecasts
There's a lot of excellent coverage of the storm from weather sites like the Weather Underground, which has a Hurricane Sandy page with a comprehensive set of forecasts and weather details. The mobile site m.wund.com/tropical compacts the information down as far as it can go, omitting all advertising and extraneous text display.
Saturday, October 27
Emergency alerts for New York City: Notify NYC.
New Jersey traffic: 511NJ.org.
New Jersey: Coastal evacuation route maps. Check these ahead of time, they are large (megabyte plus) PDF documents not suitable for tiny screens.
How much will it rain? A 5 day QPF (quantitative preciptation forecast) from HPC.
How much did it rain? Precipitation analysis from AHPS.
Connecticut's preparations for the storm are on the hash tag #ctsandy.
WNYC's Storm Surge – Flood Zone map covers New York and New Jersey.
Is the Federal Government at work? Check the Office of Personnel Management site.
Friday, October 26
NJ.com has news for New Jersey; a mobile site is at mobile.nj.com.
Windfinder has global, detailed wind forecasts for wind speed, direction, and wind gusts. Their mobile site is http://www.windfinder.mobi/, and there's also an iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile apps.
Reuters: 41 dead in Caribbean from Sandy. 11 in Cuba, 26 in Haiti.
The Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center shows a chance of flooding in the Susquehanna Valley.
The National Flood Outlook map shows a chance of flooding from coastal North Carolina north all the way to upstate New York, including the entire state of New Jersey.
Weather Canada's mobile site. An alert has been issued for Quebec.
New Hampshire: PSNH Outage List (for mobile).
Bangor (Maine) Hydro's mobile site.
Connecticut Light and Power has an outage report suitable for mobile phones.
FEMA's mobile app is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry. It contains "disaster safety tips, interactive lists for storing your emergency kit and emergency meeting location information, and a map with open shelters and open FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs)." The FEMA mobile web site is m.fema.gov.
The Red Cross hurricane application is available for iOS and Android. "Monitor conditions in your area or throughout the storm track, prepare your family and home, find help and let others know you are safe even if the power is out – a must have for anyone who lives in an area where a hurricane may strike or has loved ones who do."
Pepco has a mobile app for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
The Wall Street Journal's Twitter list @WSJ/weather is a good collection of feeds.
SpaghettiModels.com has a full set of hurricane forecast information, with a compact hurricane forecast mobile site that's worth bookmarking on a mobile phone.
Edward Vielmetti's Wordpress weblog 