Some local officials across the country are warning that due to sudden surges of eclipse tourists in places along the solar eclipse’s path, local mobile service could temporarily face outages. Cellular networks sometimes get overwhelmed when people in one place all call, text, stream, or post at once — which is likely in the case of hordes of people looking for an opportunity to view a potentially once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse.

Some areas in the eclipse’s path have brought in scaled-down cellphone towers to manage more network use. These are referred to as COWs and COLTs - for cell towers on wheels and cell towers on light trucks.

To prevent dependency on one’s cellular network, officials are advising the public to download, print or write down driving directions ahead of time, have a backup plan for emergency calls, have cash handy, and download videos or music that work fine even when one is not connected to the internet. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page