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Power

Whataburger App Becomes Unlikely Power Outage Map After Houston Hurricane (techcrunch.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the clever-thinking dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fast-food chain Whataburger's app has gone viral in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, which left around 1.8 million utility customers in Houston, Texas without power. Hundreds of thousands of those people may remain without power for days as Houston anticipates a heat wave, with temperatures climbing into the mid-90s. Amid frustrations with the local utility company CenterPoint Energy, which doesn't offer an app, some Houstonians got creative with their attempts to track the power outages. They turned to the Whataburger app instead.

Whataburger is a San Antonio-based fast-food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area, according to Newsweek. On the Whataburger app, users can see a map of Whataburger locations, with an orange logo indicating a store is open, and a grey logo meaning it's closed. Since CenterPoint Energy doesn't have an online map of outages, an X user with the screen name BBQBryan found that the map of which Whataburger stores are open could be a useful tool for seeing where there's power. This viral moment seems to have boosted Whataburger's download numbers. In the iOS App Store, Whataburger is currently ranked 16th in the food and drink category. Just three weeks ago, it was ranked 40th. "The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker, handy since the electric company doesn't show a map," BBQBryan wrote in a post that now has over 22,000 likes and 6.9 million impressions.

"Well there's a use for our app we didn't think of!" the Whataburger X account replied. "We hope you and everyone else are okay!"
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Whataburger App Becomes Unlikely Power Outage Map After Houston Hurricane More

Whataburger App Becomes Unlikely Power Outage Map After Houston Hurricane

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  • And if the page doesn't load (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @10:46PM (#64617517)

    Your local cellphone tower is down, meaning you're in the outage.

    • Re:And if the page doesn't load (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:12PM (#64617559)
      You'd be surprised how resilient those cell phone towers are. There are tons of people posting from places with power outages. People who have enough generator power to keep their phones charged
      • You could recharge your cell phone from your car for days and days, even without starting the engine to recharge the battery.

        • Wataburrger === Chicago private equity fund burger (Score:5, Insightful)

          by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:32AM (#64617695)

          2019 - Whataburger, family run business, sells out to Chicago private equity fund = https://www.restaurantdive.com... [restaurantdive.com]

          2024 - Whataburger, private equity run business, takes out large leveraged loan - https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

          Private equity will
          buy a business,
          borrow against the business' credit,
          pay the private equity fund a huge management dividend,
          strip the business of assets
          lay off large numbers of workers
          leave the business with expensive high interest rate loans, little or no assets and well on its way to bankruptcy

          • Re:Wataburrger === Chicago private equity fund bur (Score:5, Informative)

            by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:45AM (#64617709)

            Don’t forget what they did with Red Lobster. Sell off the properties so the restaurants have to pay to lease what was previously owned.

          • I've spent a lot of time visiting Texas for family and I'm bereft. I'm mean, it's a burger, man, but why does everything have to fucking rot from MBA fungus.
             
            Anybody still like to make burgers, and then make some money doing it? That is the correct order of operations with burger joints. Hey, Bill, I hear XBurger has the most profitable value concept. Yeah, I'm in the mood for a juicy, grilled, concept. I for one AM entertained, just probably not for reasons they think.

          • This is a stupid lie. They want to sell it on to another buyer, and ruining the business will damage the price they can get for it in that transaction.

            Why is Slashdot full of conspiracy socialists???

          • They did the same to Hertz Rent a Car ....

          • 2019 - Whataburger, family run business, sells out to Chicago private equity fund = https://www.restaurantdive.com... [www.restaurantdive.com]

            2024 - Whataburger, private equity run business, takes out large leveraged loan - https://www.bloomberg.com/news [bloomberg.com]...

            Private equity will
            buy a business,
            borrow against the business' credit,
            pay the private equity fund a huge management dividend,
            strip the business of assets
            lay off large numbers of workers
            leave the business with expensive high interest rate loans, little or no assets and well on its way to bankruptcy

            Definitely American. Kinda makes you feel all warm and fuzzy doesn't it? You forgot the final bullet point though:

            Everyone who worked there, not just the burger flippers, is out of a career. Not job, career. All of the other local businesses that depended on the people who lost their jobs now suffers as well. But at least massive amounts of money went into someone's pocket. Hurray for the winners! (don't look at the losers. Their suffering is painful to witness. Just let it end silently so that the next cro

      • I would be surprised, since the one in our area goes down about an hour or two after the power goes out. It's owned by Verizon. They said they were going to send a generator out to power it in the last earthquake where the power was out, then they... just didn't. I'd switch to another carrier except it wouldn't help since they'd still own the tower.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by adrn01 ( 103810 )
        So far as I know, all cell towers have battery backup good for several hours. Provided that there is access, key ones will have generators deployed to them during emergencies. Some may well have an on-site generator as part of the installation, or access to backup power from the site itself.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Guyle ( 79593 )
          Not necessarily. Remember when the FCC tried to mandate 24 hours of backup power for all cell sites and the carriers all pitched a fit [nbcnews.com] and won [lexology.com]? And continue to still argue against any regulation [lightreading.com]? They argue that their fleets of movable power generators and planning ahead for storm response is "good enough", and thankfully some tower site owners are taking it upon themselves to provide backup power solutions as well. But no, not all cell towers have backup batteries. Some do, and some have permanent generat
        • I wish that was true. Cell phone service was abysmal from Monday morning until yesterday afternoon. For both AT&T and Verizon. I had to drive around town just to find a strong enough signal to send and receive texts. Data and phone calls were out of the question. My office still doesn't have power, and I bet if I drove back over there today my phone wouldn't work very well.
          • You’re also in a huge metropolitan area (both physically and by population); presumably any tower that’s up would be swamped by zillions of phones trying to connect.

      • You'd be surprised how resilient those cell phone towers are.

        Yeah. "Unable to connect" right now*. You wouldn't be seeing this post if it wasn't for our municipal WiFi network.

        *5 bars of signal but probably no backhaul network. 3G wasn't this bad.

      • You'd be surprised how resilient those cell phone towers are. There are tons of people posting from places with power outages. People who have enough generator power to keep their phones charged

        Yeah, not this time. The cell phone networks, AT&T and Verizon, were absolute shit from Monday morning until yesterday. I had to drive around to find signal strong enough to even send text messages. And even when I could find an area where I had a strong signal, data was unusable.

    • They all have batteries. Generally swapped out yearly. (Good source of gently used batteries)

    • Not all internet access is through cellular connections. Starlink hooked up to a generator or other local power source would be particularly robust in these situations.

  • FEMA uses Waffle House (Score:5, Informative)

    by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian@bixby.gmail@com> on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @10:56PM (#64617537)

    FEMA has used what they called a "Waffle House Index" in past natural disasters in the south. Apparently Waffle House let them have access to data as to which locations had active data connections, and since Waffle House tries to distribute their sites fairly evenly throughout urban areas this allowed them to track which areas had intact infrastructure.

  • They could use McBroken - if the machines ever worked to begin with.

  • For anyone wondering (Score:5, Informative)

    by dknj ( 441802 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @11:03PM (#64617547) Journal

    Centerpoint, the energy company which manages transmission lines in Houston, released an Arcgis tableau plot map of their status map

    https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420 [arcgis.com]

    • That map is such a confusing piece of crap, but I see the finally added a legend to explain the different colors. Yesterday my neighborhood was green, but we didn't have power back until the afternoon. Now my neighborhood is blue, which supposedly means Assessment Completed when in reality we're fully energized now.

      CenterPoint is a joke. They didn't do any staging or preparation for the storm. They didn't have a working outage map until yesterday. They'll never bury any powerlines because its too expensi
      • It’s insane to me how bad their site is. Compare to Entergy (etrviewoutage.com), which shows exactly which lines are powered or not. And I do mean individual lines - not just addresses with or without power. You can see why any given house is out because you can trace the lines.

    • And everybody still used Whataburger's info because the Centerpoint map was extremely inaccurate, showing power on for residents who didn't have power, and vice versa.

  • I love Whataburger! Definitely one of the best fast food burgers!

  • Of course they don't provide an outage map (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:34AM (#64617651)

    Being able to see that sort of information over time might make it harder for Texans to keep believing their grid is as good as the rest of the country's.

    • Or, to paraphrase a well-known stable genius, "If we stop displaying outages right now, we'd have very few cases".

    • By all metrics, the Texas grid is one of the best. Compare to other large southern states like California

      • Name one metric, besides price. Go ahead, I'll wait.

      • The Texas grid is a piece of shit.
      • Not by the metric of uptime, where it currently leads the entire country in downtime. Yes, ahead of California, by +44% downtime.
        This is actually even worse if you look at that on a per-capita basis, since California has the larger population.
        That means on a per-capita basis, the Texas grid is about +30% worse than the +44%.
        Fucking ouch, man. But don't let facts get in the way of your political opinion ;)
    • The article is incorrect. It's on their web site.

  • The Whataburger point system is very clear and easy to understand and reasonably fair (it's basically a 9 to 10% reward).

    And they *do not want access to all your contacts so you can order from them* (which I why I will not use the McDonalds app.)

    I've had a couple tricky situations like the shake machine was broken after I ordered and support was good and from a *human being* .

    Ordering a burger or chicken sandwich is *easy* to get exactly like I want it.

    ---

    The centerpoint app sends *way too much data* to *ev

  • Interesting that an app, which runs on a phone or tablet is able to assist here considering that the phone is running on borrowed time and the infrastructire itself may or may not have power for much longer.

    During the big winter storms in the UK a few years ago Yorkshire had its entire power grid literally torn apart overnight leving everyone without power *for weeks* in near zero and sub zero tempteratures. No water, gas or power.

    The only things that stayed working were the landlines, and the mobile servic

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      I live further south, albeit within sight of the Yorkshire border.

      I assume you mean the copper landlines, the ones that are being scrapped, as opposed to the fibres which will be our new landlines, but want to double-check just in case the telecoms companies actually kept those working as well.

      • Copper landlines carry their own power, fibre landlines don't and need a separate electricity supply to operate.

        • Copper landlines carry their own power, fibre landlines don't and need a separate electricity supply to operate.

          Yea, getting a dial tone was one thing you could be pretty much assured of when everything else went dark; of course nowadays many people have never even heard a dial tone, and the idea of on-hook/off-hook would be met with a blank stare.

      • > I assume you mean the copper landlines, the ones that are being scrapped

        Yes, the copper ones. Which for the properties I was thinking of, farmhouses and small villages out in the dales, would have very likely be what they still had.

        As for the fibre ones, keeping your router/ONT powered with a UPS will allow you to use them, depending on what exists between you and the exchange. Then its a matter of "which bit in the chain loses power first".

  • Is that their forecasted low temp? That doesn't even seem like that hot of a temp for Houston from what I've heard from people who used to live there.

    Granted I would find it miserable, but people who live there claim you can grow "acclimated" to the heat. I'm pretty sure that's kinder way to say "you survive it or it kills you".

  • This probably should've been included in the summary, but Whataburger is open 24 hours a day and there's lots of them in Texas. If you can map Whataburger closings, then you can closely approximate power outages.

    • Eh, its only useful in a very broad sense. I don't have a WB within 2 miles. But within that 2 miles there were numerous neighborhoods and shopping centers, both with and without power. So for me, it was completely useless.

      • During the great Texas freeze of 2021, I lost power while my neighbor across the street didn't. I was hoping my pipes wouldn't burst and he had his Christmas lights on (in February).

      • My guess is that a lot of people learned from the big Texas power outage and had installed backup generators to keep their businesses open in case of a repeat. This could be to provide a means to sell product, provide a means of emergency shelter to the community, perhaps a bit of both. The USDA sets standards on how long meat and dairy can be without active refrigeration before the product can no longer be sold. I can imagine in a power outage a restaurant is selling ice cream cones at a nickel a piece

  • But (Score:2)

    by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

    The Texas Electrical grid is totally the best in the world! It's so strong and fairly operated.

  • In the UK ehen we have power issues we get notifications via SMS and can track the locations and specific details of the issues (what is wrong, where, how long it has been happening and status updates on the repairs) just by visiting a site like https://www.ukpowernetworks.co... [ukpowernetworks.co.uk] and entering your postcode. Should your postcode not be in the area they cover they link you to the relevant site for your area.

    You can also check on planned outages as well.

    Obviously you need access to the net. If you dont have a

  • Not that I care. Texans voted for this again and again, let them eat cake.

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