Mid-August brought two catastrophic floods to the village, where the network is located. Perry County declared a state of emergency on August 11 and 16, as floodwaters rose 8 feet in low lying areas and displaced 380 people (pop. 2,418). A month’s rain in 3 hours forced night evacuations and water rescues by boat, and the second flood wiped out relief supplies staged for those affected by the first flood.

In a Kafkaesque spiral, our submerged AEP substation precipitated 4,400 people to lose power in town and neighboring villages. South of town, the old industrial bridge washed out entirely, and Main Street and Ceramic Road bridges were taken over by water, trapping people in town. Last week, the village raised enough funds to purchase its own water rescue boat. Not a joke.

Signal direction of two Autonomy’s access points run northeast and southwest, 450 feet parallel to Moxahala Creek, which burst its banks. Officials even had to publicly deny rumors that a nearby reservoir failed, revealing a type of hardened disaffection toward the criminal machinery that is local government.

Mesh hardware on higher ground survived both floods but was offline during the outage. We're currently remapping node placement and signal coverage to flex with displacement and the structures demolished altogether. Looking ahead, we're also scoping failover scenarios for a separate, encrypted network that runs over LoRa radio, independently of the internet, when this inevitably happens again.

On a personal note, floods wrung out while attending DeepMay, another Raft Foundation collective, whose comrades offered a soft landing. In full circle, Autonomy's now talking mesh with an autonomous space in Gary, IN, which was hit by same storm. Wading into deeper waters now.