Frustrated by blackouts, 22-year-old builds community power outage map

When Enemalta's live outage map failed to show power cuts in his own neighbourhood, a 22-year-old from Qormi built his own.

Less than 24 hours later, the community-powered website has attracted more than 10,000 visitors as Malta continues to grapple with blackouts.

Justin Byrne created his website, Dawl, which lets residents report an outage on their street, after finding that Enemalta's official map gave him no way to check whether his own family had been affected.

"I wanted to check if my family, loved ones, grandma were also being affected by the power cut, but Enemalta does not provide that information. It wasn't being transparent," he said.

Byrne, who has a background in software development, actually built the website during an outage that was not recorded on Enemalta's live map. Without power in his own home, he took his laptop to the Malta International Airport and spent eight hours there building the site. 

The website www.dawl.app went live on Wednesday at 4pm.

How it works

Less than 24 hours after launch, Dawl had logged 10,467 unique visitors and 1,944 individual reports, according to figures shared with Times of Malta.

Homepage of 'dawl' website

The map currently shows more than 600 streets without power across 55 localities, with most reports coming from Birkirkara, Valletta and St Paul's Bay.

Users can report an outage in one of two ways. They can tap a "report" button and type in their street name, or open the map itself, click on their street, scroll through other people's reports and select "I'm out too".

A reported street turns bright red for the first 30 minutes, orange if the outage persists for up to two hours, yellow if it was first reported earlier the same day, and grey once it is considered older.

Byrne said the system was "designed to be self-correcting rather than reliant on official confirmation. It's a community map. Confidence comes from how many separate people report the same street". 

A street shows as 'confirmed' once a second separate person backs it. Each connection is capped at two reports per hour "to limit abuse," he said.

There is purposefully no button to mark power as restored, he explained.

"'There's no 'power's back' button, by design. Reports fade on their own: bright red under 30 minutes, orange up to two hours, yellow up to six hours, then grey 'may be resolved.' If nobody re-confirms, it dims and drops off," he said. 

Gap in the market

Byrne's map follows widespread complaints that Enemalta's official outage map does not record all power cuts. The site currently shows only a part of Valletta experiencing outages.

Enemalta's live outages map shows part of Valletta hit by power cuts. Photo: Enemalta

When Times of Malta asked Enemalta's CEO about this on Wednesday, Ryan Fava said the map only displays  “high-tension outages.” These are outages at the source of an area’s power supply which affect entire neighbourhoods.

Other outages being experienced in other localities are individual “low-tension outages” which affect individual homes or a relatively small cluster of properties, he said.

The energy ministry has said those experiencing outages of six hours or longer will be compensated for their losses.

Over the last few days people have resorted to sleeping on their rooftops, in their cars with their air conditioning running or, for those who can afford to, booking in to a hotel to get some relief.