1.5 Million Users Lean on Storm Center Maps as Winter Storm Hits Texas
February 28, 2023
In early 2023, a severe ice storm blew across the Southern United States, resulting in massive outages. Texas was particularly hard hit, with many customers left without power for extended periods. Unofficially named Winter Storm Mara, the effects of the winter storm lasted over a 3-day period, from January 31-February 2, 2023.
During these three days, KUBRA worked closely with its Utility Partners, leveraging its outage communications solutions, Storm Center™ (our interactive outage map solution) and Notifi® (our alerts and preference management platform), to communicate the scope of the outages, which areas were affected, what caused the outage, and when power was estimated to be restored.
Number of Outages and Customers Affected by the Ice Storm
Although the height of the storm only lasted three days, its impact was severe. In this short time span, Storm Center maps recorded a total of 12,118 outages across our Utility Partners. Over 600,000 customers were left without power during this time, with half of those on February 1 alone.
Outage Map Visitors and Enrollments
Almost 1.2 million new users accessed our Utility Partners Storm Center maps during the three-day period. This accounted for a total of 1.5 million users and 2.8 million map views. Many of these came from returning users who accessed their utility’s Storm Center map on more than one occasion to get the outage information they needed as they rode out the storm.
On a single day (February 1) our utility partners received 1.6 million map views. Over 80% of the map traffic came from mobile devices. 64% of users relied on their iOS devices to get the outage information they needed, while 21% were Android users.
During the storm, 45,000 customers signed up to actively receive outage notifications from their utility providers so that they could receive estimates on when the lights would go back on.
Session Duration and Map Performance
Due to the vast amount of outage information provided through our utility partners’ Storm Center maps, customers spent on average session duration of four minutes and 20 seconds getting updates on outages that were affecting their neighborhoods. On February 1, customers spent, on average, almost six minutes reviewing outage information concerning them. Given the global benchmark for average session duration ranges between two to four minutes, the lengthy sessions reinforce the usefulness of the data presented on the maps.
Even though our utility partners experienced a surge in map traffic, map performance remained constant as it took, on average, only two seconds to load pages.
KUBRA Is an Industry Leader in Providing Solutions for Outage Communications
For over a decade, KUBRA has worked with some of the largest utility companies in North America, providing them with best-in-class outage communications solutions.