Why Do I Get an Error Message? And Why Does It Take So Long to Load Sometimes?

Occasionally a window may pop up in the middle of the map telling you that an error has occurred (example below).

The most likely cause of this is that the map was not fully loaded into your web browser. To solve this problem, press the OK button to clear the window and then refresh the web page. In Internet Explorer 7, the refresh button is located here:

In Firefox 3, the refresh button is located here:

To get the best results from the mapping application, be patient with data loading into the web browser. The multiple sources and amount of data delivered via this system cannot be loaded as fast as many simple web pages on the Internet. One way to tell if the site is still loading data is to watch the status bars of the map and web browser. The map bar is located on the bottom right corner of the map (see below), and the web browser status bar is on the left side of the browser at the bottom (see below).