During Hurricane Helene, I Just Wanted a Plain Text Website

This is an interesting story about someone remembering their experience during a local state of emergency. Service was difficult to find and slow. Websites were too bloated to load, even the emergency ones. All they wanted was some direly needed information in standard text format.

I remember experiencing something similar when the Tubbs Fire hit our town. It was impossible to get websites to load, and people were walking all over to the community center just to get a sliver of a bar. It all felt pointless. I couldn’t get much in over it.

It does make a lot of sense for emergency pages to be built as mostly plain text/HTML. At the very least, they should serve a plain text version with all the headlines as the default during actual emergencies. There’s nothing more rage inducing than navigating a series of nested menus with bloated pages all at a crawl to find information you need and then you end up at some random pdf in the end.

What do you guys think? Got any personal experiences or situations where you would have killed for some plaintext?