MapLab: The Humble Origins of the Definitive Blackout Tracker

When a blast of frigid weather plunged an estimated 15 million Texans into days of darkness this month, many eyes turned to PowerOutage.us. The online aggregator and live map of power outage data from 728 utilities across the U.S. and Canada hit a record 1 million web requests per hour during the Texas blackout, serving up critical county-level information to journalists, government officials and observers around the world.

Yet the fact that this reliable and comprehensive source of national outage data exists is rather incidental. Jason Robinson, a database administrator at a credit card processing company, started the website in 2016 as a geeky side project. Piqued by a childhood fascination with the destructive force of hurricanes and other grid-snapping events, he started amassing data from his local utility in Portland, Maine, so that he could learn about cloud computing.