Hurricane Ida

Just a few days ago, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ida came through New Orleans and other areas in Louisiana.  Hurricane Katrina was a major hurricane, but the real story came after the hurricane when the levees broke and flooded the city.  Hurricane Ida was also a major hurricane, but once again, a major issue has been what has come after the storm passed.  This time, it has been a lack of power and AT&T cell phone service.  I expected to lose power during a hurricane, but normally the power is restored in just a few days, if not sooner.  This time, there is a chance that it may take much longer, perhaps even a few weeks.  I hope it isn’t that long, but we’ll see.

We lost power at my house at Noon on Sunday, and for most of Sunday afternoon, my iPhone was an essential tool for monitoring the news and keeping in touch with others.  But for folks like me who use AT&T, a problem started late in the day on Sunday:  it become virtually impossible to get a signal.  And this remained the case until early Tuesday morning, with a few minor exceptions where service was available for a few minutes.  Thus, during the very time that folks were trying to call or text loved ones to ensure that they were safe, they were unable to do so.  And folks trying to access news and other information on the emergency could not do so.  Even 911 service was interrupted in many areas.  Thank goodness I purchased a very good emergency radio very recently so that we could get information from the local radio stations when there was no other way to know what was going on.  In fact, I suspect that some of you outside of New Orleans know more about Hurricane Ida than I do.

Besides that radio, I also used every portable battery in my possession to maintain charges on my iPhone and my wife’s iPhone to use them before the storm and to keep them charged afterwards so that we would be ready whenever we could finally use our iPhones again.  It seems like you can never have enough portable batteries.  The Anker PowerCore 10000 (my review) was a particularly good one because it is small and packs a lot of power.

I’ll share one last tidbit.  As cell service slowly started to become available, it would often work for only a few minutes.  I found that I could sometimes get it working again, for a few minutes, if I turned on airplane mode, waited a few seconds, and then turned off airplane mode to force my iPhone to make a new connection to a cell tower.  I did this so often that I finally paused and created a very simple shortcut that did these steps for me:

I then pressed the three dots at the top right and selected Add to Home Screen.  That created an icon on my home screen.  I could tap the icon and the iPhone would enter airplane mode, wait, then turn off airplane mode for me and I could see in the top corner whether I got a connection.  By using this trick, I was finally able to start to communicate with at least a few folks on Monday afternoon and evening.

If there was a silver lining to the last few days, it was that disasters like this often bring out the best in people. Everywhere you looked, people were helping other people to get back on their feet.  I certainly received countless messages and offers of help from new and old friends, clients, and even a large number of iPhone J.D. readers., and I know that countless others did too.  It is nice to have a reminder that there is a lot of good in the world and that we all do better when we help out each other.