Every tower filled before the floods

Chidi runs diesel deliveries to the generators at nine hundred mobile towers across Lagos. When the grid fails, the towers run on diesel. In the rainy season, roads flood and his tankers get stuck for a day. Towers run dry, and whole neighbourhoods lose signal. Last July, sixty towers went dark in one week. With xMap Flows, Chidi built Juniper. Every morning at five, Juniper reads the towers running low on diesel from the company’s fuel list, checks the rain coming at each one, and where heavy rain is on its way, plans a refuelling run for today, sends it to the drivers in Teams, and keeps the rest on the normal schedule. On a Monday in July, Juniper sees heavy rain heading for Ikorodu and Lekki on Wednesday. Twenty-six towers are filled on Monday and Tuesday, before the water rises. That week, not one tower runs dry. Chidi can’t stop the rain. He just gets there before it.

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