How man's 'side project' became go-to info source during major weather events

For Jason Robinson, the test of mettle came in 2017 when Hurricane Irma knocked out more than 1 million electric customers' power. The major hurricane slammed into Florida with maximum winds at 115 mph before pushing farther into the southern United States. As electricity flickered out for millions, Robinson's humble home setup in Portland, Maine, shed a light on the hardest-hit areas.

"It was nerve-racking for that first storm," Robinson, the creator of PowerOutages.US told AccuWeather in a Zoom interview.

To make matters more intense as he watched his personal project gain traction, a denial of service attack downed the website for a solid 20 minutes during the event before it was restored.

The power outages associated with Hurricane Irma in 2017 was the single-biggest outage event tracked on PowerOutage.US after 7.6 million customers lost electricity.

The storm had claimed an estimated 129 lives across Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, at least 20 of which were associated with power outages. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed 17 of those deaths as heat-related deaths associated with a lack of air conditioning, the remaining three associated with patients whose medical treatment, such as supplemental oxygen, was dependent on electricity. Fourteen of those 17 heat-related deaths were residents of a nursing home in Florida that was without power for several days.

A look at Jason Robinson's setup for PowerOutage.US. (Jason Robinson)

After Hurricane Irma, Robinson's side-project quickly grew into a website trusted by news organizations, emergency management agencies and even the United States military.

"Every time I see it mentioned on a news story or on TV or on the radio, it's like, 'Cool, I made that -- that's something I made that's helping people across the United States and across the world,'" Robinson said.

Toward the end of 2017, Robinson created Bluefire Studios LLC, a small business geared around running PowerOutage.US and providing information covering power outages across the nation.

The beginnings of PowerOutage.US stemmed from a combination of Robinson's fascination with watching storms move through areas via power outage maps along with a history of work with IT and databases, and he noticed a gap in the marketplace.

"I thought, 'Hey, there's no place right now to view all this information in one spot. Let's try and make one,'" Robinson said. "It purely started as a side project for learning about new technology, and it's just grown exponentially from there."

Jason Robinson founded Bluefire Studios LLC and created PowerOutage.US. (Jason Robinson)

The website tracks power outages from more than 650 utilities across the U.S., and while it relies on the data it receives from these sources for accuracy, it's also one of the most complete sources of power outage information currently available. While the system mostly runs by itself, Robinson also monitors and checks the data for integrity issues, such as looking for any inconsistencies in the data sent from power utilities.

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Ahead of any major weather events, Robinson prepares extra servers for the website to be able to handle different traffic loads and hunker down to monitor the onset of data about to flood in.

"Utilities like to change their systems during major events," Robinson said. "They'll either stop reporting more detailed data and go to a higher level where they're only reporting high-level information, so we have to be at the ready to get on and handle those and change their integrations to parse that data correctly."

Web requests for PowerOutage.US during the 2021 Texas Power Crisis. The chart shows 63 million web requests within seven days with a peak of 1.12 million in a single hour. (Jason Robinson)

One of the pluses of the website, Robinson noted, was that the site eases the load from the website of utility companies, which can get bogged down during major events.

"The utilities' websites wind up going down, having trouble loading just because of the sheer amount of load that they're getting, and their focus is on restoring power," Robinson said.

PowerOutage.US, Robinson added, provides a place for web traffic originally destined for an electric company's website to split off to, easing what can sometimes be a crushing load.

The most recent large-scale event PowerOutage.US had tracked at the time of the interview was the 2021 Texas Power Crisis which saw around 4.4 million customers without power after a series of winter storms swept through the state during mid-February.

According to data compiled, officials in Texas blamed 246 fatalities on that brutal stretch of winter weather and said, "the majority of verified deaths were associated with hypothermia." AccuWeather estimated the economic toll of that weather event could be as much as $155 billion across Texas and several other states.

A snapshot of power outages across the central U.S. during the February outages. (Jason Robinson)

While the storms had been forecast to hit the state and cause power outages, a combination of inadequately winterized natural gas equipment along with the state's isolated power grid contributed to the widespread loss of power as well as the time span over which power remained down. The event also brought the largest number of visitors to PowerOutage.US as many across the nation looked to keep a pulse on the situation.

"We had so many people reaching out from news agencies, from companies, individual people, I got thousands and thousands of emails," Robinson said. "It was crazy. I'm still working on the data requests for that event to this day."

Aside from some contractors he hired to help with some coding, Robinson has run PowerOutage.US on his own for the past four years, though noted he's looking into expanding the website.

In addition to responding to data requests from the Texas event, Robinson noted he was currently working on expanding the site to cover the United Kingdom and add power outage alerts.

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