United Illuminating (“UI”) providers electricity to 324,000 homes in southern Connecticut — including, most importantly, my parents.  At about 8:45 AM on Monday, August 29, 2011 — that’s the day after Hurricane Irene hit Connecticut, and, more importantly, 26 hours after my parents lost power — they sent the tweet above.

The big question?  What would make for “good information”? 

I am only one data point, but I’m willing to bet that my experience isn’t all that unique.  I’ve been following @UnitedIllum since early yesterday when my parent lost power but had working (non-cell) phones.  I acted as a relay.  

I wanted to know:

• Where downed power lines were.  UI explicitly told followers that these were dangerous.  Telling people where to avoid is key, especially in the case of those who don’t have power and are trying to get to places where there is electricity.
• Specificity.  My parents have been told — by the radio — that some areas of town and the region generally may have to wait a week for power.  But that’s meaningless.  Their town has hilly areas (like theirs) and beachfront areas (15 minutes away by car).  The former aren’t going to flood, but may have trees down.  The latter doesn’t have many trees to fall down, but there were people kayaking in the street.  
• Ideally, timetables for getting power back up.  We understand there are no guarantees, but if it is “12 to 48 hours,” my parents are staying put.  If it is “5 to 7 days,” they’ll go elsewhere.

What I didn’t really care about: — these are nice to know, but not the core, important info:

• Why they lost power.  I’m going to go with “hurricane” for that one.
• What’s being done to fix the power.  I trust that the power company is working on it, and whatever they do, I trust is the best thing to do.  
• Generalities as to who lost power and generalities as to timelines.  As noted above, these don’t really help.  They’re nice to know to round out the narrative, sure. 

Unfortunately, the second set of bullets is what UI has basically done, to date, exacerbated by the fact that their website has been down on and off during and after the storm. They sent the tweet pictured above a total of four times in about 24 hours, which constitutes about 20% of their messaging.   The rest could be summed up as “we’re working on it!” and “this is a big freaking problem!”  Not very valuable.

(To their credit, they offered an honestly valuable PSA, telling people to stay away from downed power lines, because they may be live.)

And, to make the implied explicit, they aren’t replying to requests for more information — which seem to be the bulk of requests.  I’ve put together a Storify of some @UnitedIllum tweets over the last day, which you can read below or here.  They’re not in time order unfortunately, but they give an idea for how poorly UI is handling the communication issue.