Lot's of love for accessibility folks in education. Maybe a small consolation, but we just made AccessLint, our GitHub code review application free for edu's, inspired by this thread.
The gem uses an obscured API endpoint that feeds http://apps.coned.com/stormcenter_external/. ConEd's version of the app makes 2 ajax calls, one to an xml file that gets regenerated every 15 minutes and shows the timestamp of the report json feed. The second call gets the json that gets parsed in the app.
I've done a rudimentary version of jpetterson's at http://stormpox.com (much less pretty). I'm running a rake task that gets called via cron job. The rake task fetches and parses the feed (via the sandy gem) and posts it to a google spreadsheet via the google_drive API. stormpox.com is running as a static site on heroku with an embedded google timeline chart that auto-updates when the spreadsheet changes, and voila, insta-outage-chart (albeit google branded).