There's communication by interruption and there's observation. If you have a situation where there need to be hourly updates, there should be a person explicitly tasked with observing and noting what's going on to be able to provide those updates with minimal impact to the group that's actually working the problem.

Unfortunately, that means the observer has to be able to understand and follow what the engineers are doing while staying out of the way as much as possible. Tricky, but something you really need if for no other reason than to communicate and look for any holes that the team/person working the problem may not have thought of in the interim.