Real-time Mapping of Hurricane Laura’s Impact on Internet Infrastructure
Our measurements show that a number of counties are effectively offline after Laura swept through.
Hurricane Laura is considered one of the most powerful storms in U.S. history, already leaving a path of destruction and 6 dead in affected areas in Louisiana and Texas. The storm reached wind gusts of up to 150 mph and has left over 850,000 people without electricity.
Functioning Internet and Telecommunications (ICT) infrastructure is essential during times of disaster but this type of infrastructure is also among the first to be impacted by natural disasters.
To provide policy-makers and first responders with (close-to) real-time information on ICT depravation and outages, the Monash IP-Observatory from SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School will be publishing analysis and visualisations of Laura’s impact on ICT infrastructure over the coming days.
This analysis complements previous applications of our technology to Hurricane Florence in 2018, Cyclone Fani in 2019 and the Puerto Rico earthquake in 2020.
During natural disasters, alternative data such as satellite and social media data as well as the IP data we collect at the IP-Observatory offer key information that can give first responders, humanitarian organizations, and news media an idea of how people are being affected on the ground and where resources should be allocated.
Remotely Observing Hurricane Laura’s Path of Destruction
With its global platform, the Monash IP-Observatory continuously monitors global internet infrastructure 24/7. This allows us not only to monitor the impact of a disaster event on local internet infrastructure, but also to compare any disruptions to local internet connectivity to a baseline, prior to a disaster.
So far the Observatory has detected outages of varying degrees in those areas were Laura made landfall.
In the Figure below, we visualise the impact on ICT at the county level in the region around Orange County, Texas.
The map shows the relatively tight, but violent path of destruction after making landfall around 1am on the 27th Aug 2020.
Over the next 24 hours, we observed major ICT impacts in the counties in the pathway, with Orange County (Texas) and Calcasieu County (Louisiana) the two most impacted counties to this point.
Our index of total ICT impact is constructed to take the value of 100 if a county were to have completely lost Internet connectivity for all hours following the landfall event. A value of 0 would imply no loss of connectivity during this time.
At total ICT impact of 81, Orange County, Texas, is so far the most severely impacted, followed closely by its immediately neighbouring county of Calcasieu over the state border in Louisiana.
Comparing differential impacts over time and between counties
Our monitoring technology allows us to measure differential impacts on ICT infrastructure by county in a time-series comparison.
Figure 2 below plots the level of Internet Connectivity in the worst affected counties in Louisiana and Texas by comparing the baseline period, prior to the landfall event, to the measured connectivity following landfall.
As can be seen in the figure above, off a baseline connectivity index of around 7 to 10 across the six counties shown, Hurricane Laura’s landfall had a major impact on the availability of ICT in these counties.
Unsurprisingly, counties on the coast such as Orange County, Texas (light blue line), and Calcasieu County, Louisiana (orange line) were immediately impacted by the landfall event, falling to a value of 1 out of 10 almost immediately, implying a near complete loss of electricity and/or ICT service.
Whereas Natchitoches County, Louisiana (purple line), situated inland from the coast, was impacted with an approximately 2–3 hour delay before it too succumbed to the devastating impact of the hurricane.
On the other hand, the traces show that some counties may be entering a recovery phase already, in terms of ICT availability. Jefferson Davis (Louisiana), Acadia (Louisiana), and Jefferson (Texas) are all already climbing in online activity.
We will continue to provide updates through the event on the impact and recovery as Laura moves further inland.
Get the data
Update: hourly connectivity data available at Monash IP Observatory Open.
Our Methodology
To generate the data behind these observations, we combine a commercially available geo-located IP database with our powerful scanning technology which measures the online or offline status of millions of Internet addresses globally every hour.
Our observational methodology uses the most basic Internet messaging protocol that is widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share. After developing a carefully selected set of Internet addresses (IPs) to measure, we periodically send them one of these tiny messages, essentially asking, ‘Are on you online?’. These online/offline answers form the basis for our ‘connectivity’ indicators.
Importantly, the IP Observatory has no access to any content being shared, viewed, visited, or generated by a user at a given IP, and all IP Observatory activity works in aggregates of thousands of randomly sampled measurements across geo-spatial sub-regions.
Note, in the analysis presented in this note, only counties for which our infrastructure have sufficient measurement basis are shown.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflicts. The IP-Observatory is fully compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR). The IP-Observatory does not collect, hold or process personal data. The IP Observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
