Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked). Woot!<p>"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.<p>The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.<p>Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.<p>On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.