The best part was the emergency phone alert they pushed out several hours late that didn't even have any information about what the emergency was, which resulted in 911 being flooded. Some jokes were made about the new hire from Hawaii...
No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else?
I knew all about HN, but no clue that we couldnt use water.
I can't stand Facebook, but it was better than nothing during the Northern California wildfires this last year, so I logged in and used it. The groups created by residents to track info were wonderful at first, but quickly descended into somewhat low utility after a day or tow as people regurgitated old information and misinformation every few hours, each time one level removed from the source and thus a bit harder for people to confirm or deny.
My wide uses nextdoor.com, and I've long thought I should take a look, but never gotten around to it. It would be interesting to see if Google can leverage their brand name to get enough people to sign up such that you could easily switch between multiple levels of locality, and also allow local news to leverage that in a way that preserves local reporting. If I could easily toggle between neighborhood, school district, city, state and region to find relevant information, and discussions, I would be pleasantly surprised.
Everyone referred you to the city's home page. The site buckled under the load, and was completely unresponsive for hours. If it was a more urgent emergency, the lack of information could have led to people being harmed.
I was hoping they would switch to a less dynamic site for alert pages, perhaps use a CDN or edge proxy like cloudflare, etc. But no, it appears demand just died off, and they are still doing the same thing. They just put out info on where you can go to national guard filling stations to fill up water bottles, and their home made .net based website is back to taking 10 seconds to render the home page.