My Fireblog: Trip to Paris. I mean, Perris.

Sign on San Diego's "fire blog" has been the most up-to-date source of news, including info on new areas that have been evacuated and/or caught fire. But for those of us without land lines, and without knowledge of how to register cell phone numbers with the Reverse 911 system until like two days into the whole fiasco, this website also served as our freaking lifeline. It's kind of sad to have to rely on the internet to tell you when you might have to run for your life... Because of this, I gave it a permanent spot on my desktop and refreshed it more frequently than I did my undergrad transcript when grades were supposed to come out. And that's saying a lot.

Early Sunday afternoon, I began to smell smoke. It was hot and dry and eerily silent despite strong winds; the palm trees outside my bedroom window made foreboding crackling sounds as it rustled. By Monday morning, the air had a dead yellow tint to it, and I could see ashes collecting at the bottom of our swimming pool. The sun was a bright red ball in the sky, and at dusk it produced a magnificent, almost synthetic-like sun set with gorgeous shades of bold orange, reds, and pinks. Too bad it would be at the cost of so many homes and exasperated firefighters.

Sometime on Monday night, we came to this realization. There were four fires bordering the north, east, and south sides of us, and two of the three major highways out of the city had been closed. The powerful Santa Ana winds were not expected to die down until Thursday. It seemed like a new county was being given the "go" every hour or so, and Del Mar and Solana Beach -- only about 15 miles north of us -- had just been evacuated all the way out to the coast. Two fires raged within 15 miles of Qualcomm Stadium, the evacuation shelter for our area, and it was already a fifth of the way full, having not evacuated any of central San Diego. The air was hardly breathable and it was hot and stuffy inside the condo with all windows and doors closed.

All of this makes it perfectly logical for me, after receiving a call from my energized-and-adventure-prone friend at 2 a.m., to jump the gun, pile into two cars with five other people, and "book the hell out of the city" on the last open freeway. Yeaaa. And that is all I am going to say about *that* little fiasco...

Two discoveries that came out of this whole experience, both of them (unsurprisingly) singing Google's praise:

1. GOOG-411 is actually really useful when fleeing a fire into an unknown town. We arrived randomly in Perris, CA at around 5:30 a.m., because we were too tired to drive any further, and were far enough away to have clean air and a peace of mind. When the fancy, built-in GPS system on our car failed to give any valid hotel numbers, GOOG-411 saved our butts. It is the sole reason for me being asleep in a hotel room by 6 a.m. Later, we used it to find restaurants, starbucks, video rental stores, movie theatres, etc.
   While Verizon Wireless (and other similar carriers) offer 411 services that charge by the call and make you talk to a real person, GOOG-411 is totally free and completely automated through speech recognition. That means, you don't feel bad when you hang up mid-call. It's 'text message' option (which texts you all info including address and number) is also extremely useful, especially when hotel personnel have enunciation problems...

2. The open source aspect of Google maps has played a huge role in monitoring the status of the fire. Sites like latimes.com, kpbs.org, and signonsandiego.com were able to offer interactive Google maps that pinpointed not only areas of evacuation and fire, but also shelters, road closures, smoke advisories, homes destroyed, etc.
   Its inherent feature for being able to tie information to location and then search through listings also proved indispensable for this purpose. For example, details about the number of homes destroyed, acres burned, firefighters on the job, etc. were tied to each fire (click image to enlarge).
   
   It is a powerful interface for relaying geographically significant information and I think very useful natural disaster related applications can be built by combining this interface with the "wisdom of the crowd". For example, it would've been helpful if the average person could contribute reports on what they see/hear/smell of the fire their location on the map. They could even discuss planned evacuation routes, report on traffice in the area, their way of getting contacted for evacuation, etc. (replacing the several active forums that have sprung up over the last couple of days).
   Shelters/firefighters themselves could contribute to information and numbers, providing more abundant, reliable, and up-to-date information. Information (data-mining? or just good old manual input) from blogs, news reports, or radio broadcasts could also be stripped and added on. Perhaps a digg-like rating system could be put in effect that would allow most popular/reliable reports to show up most visibly (i.e. on the least zoomed in version of the map). If monitored correctly, information would flow bottom-up instead of top-down -- something that has been proven successful more than once.

For the record, I was pretty impressed at how smoothly the evacuations seemed to progress. If only they had broadcast info earlier about how poor grad students who don't own land lines can sign up for Reverse 911. Is this some kind of occupational-profiling?