We all know the story. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama causing extensive loss of life and tremendous property damage. Nearly two thousand people died. Two years later, the region, particularly New Orleans, still hasn’t fully recovered.

We wanted to see how a major storm like Katrina affected people’s use of the Internet. Compete analyzed use of weather related web sites by inhabitants of the affected states during the interval before Katrina hit. We extended this analysis with a study of the main government reconstruction and recovery web sites over the month after the disaster.

Before the Hurricane Hit

It was a big storm and people knew it was coming. Weather sites were a major source of information about the approaching storm. We took a deeper look at traffic to weather.com, wunderground.com, and similar sites over the days before Katrina’s landfall on August 29. We looked at the browsing behavior of inhabitants of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida.

Anxiety and web visitation heightened as the storm approached the coast. The number of people visiting web sites and the intensity of their use tripled in the week before the storm. Traffic fell off after the initial wind and flood destruction was complete.

The Aftermath

My wife went to New Orleans in February 2007 with a group of volunteers to help recovery efforts. She described mile after mile after mile of total destruction – eighteen months after the storm. This damage was personal as well as financial. In ruined houses, she found books of ruined photographs, children’s toys, and other reminders of lives left behind.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was immediately put in charge of disaster recovery and reconstruction. Other government agencies involved were the state-level analogues of FEMA in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. These web sites would serve as an important source of information for disaster victims to find and apply for the help they desperately needed. We looked at traffic from residents of the affected areas to the FEMA site as well as the three state-level EMA sites:

Daily numbers are highly volatile but the overall message is clear: FEMA and state EMAs were rarely visited before the storm. Afterwards, they were a vital point of contact for the affected citizens.

After the hurricane, a large fraction of the web traffic to these sites came from Katrina-affected areas. Over the month after Katrina, almost half the visits to these sites came from the states hit by the storm. Much of the other traffic, we believe, came from families and by the people displaced and scattered across the US.

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