Monday, October 22, 2007

The San Diego Fire Map Coverage

Update: You can find the October 25 maps here.

Update, October 24: If this solution is a bit to tech-geeky for you, I've captured the map images and posted them here for the Witch Creek fire and here for the Harris fire. I will be updating them throughout the day.

Meanwhile, the map coverage in the news media for the first two days could have been drawn by a twelve-year-old. Here's the kind of information we're getting off of the web.

Update 6: San Diego State University (SDSU) has done a killer job on the map situation. Check it out here. I am using this to keep track of my parent's property which is in the fire area. I highly recommend it.

Meanwhile, here's the kind of crap we get from the mainstream media:

This map is valid as of 2230 Oct. 21. That was 15 hours ago as of right now.

There are helicopters in the sky, fire trucks on the ground and policemen all over the place. Each of these units has GPS. Each of these units have communications back to a central base. And the reason that the map up above (which hasn't been updated in hours and represents only one of eight fires and is THE ONLY ONE AVAILABLE ON THE WEB) looks like it was drawn by my daughter is...what? What's the excuse?

Doing transparent overlays with active elements on Google Earth is a solved problem. It's not hard. Distributing such maps via a live website is a solved problem. That's not hard. Meanwhile, we get old, static pdf files because this technology has not been adopted by the insurance companies, the local government or the news media.

Of course, we shouldn't be too hard on the news media. Those marginally literate farm animals are mesmerized by pretty pictures. There were no maps on any of the news media sites I looked at, but lots and lots of pictures of fire.

Do you know fire looks like? If not, stop by KNSD's website. They'll show you.

Thanks, KNSD. Thanks, City and County of San Diego. Thanks a lot.

Update: You can find a decent map of the fires here. It looks like it's a group effort by bloggers and not affiliated with any of the ruminants in the media other than using them as sources.

Update2 : KGTV, our local ABC affiliate has these useful maps to offer.



Thanks guys. That was just great.

Update 3: The San Diego Union Tribune did give us a list of road closures. In text. With no accompanying map. No, that's fine. Really. Just go ahead and put your heads on your desks and take a nap.

Update 4: OK, this is a hall-of-fame entry for stupid information distribution design. The city of Poway has hidden some of its fire information behind a password-protected section of its website. On this page, the link for "Witch Fire Emergency Press Releases and News" leads to this.

Update 5: Finally, a good source of map data.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Word on the lack of maps. Perhaps they're too busy to put pushpins in their bulletin boards.

FWIW, here's something I've found helpful:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?uid=103734099241550080511&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=2&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=107592071260393044446.00043d12d7e7e7af51aaa

signon said...

SignOnSanDiego.com has a Google map up on their home page showing evacuation locations and estimated fire locations along with additional text information at the bottom of the page.

http://media.signonsandiego.com/fires/

Anonymous said...

This is the best one so far:

http://and-still-i-persist.com/?cat=50

K T Cat said...

Vandy, I could not get to that UT site. Must be a lousy server or overwhelmed connection.

Anon - found the site and linked to it. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Right on KT!

I've been trying to extract useful information all day... flipping channels and comparing the words and pictures of the on scene reporters and my Thomas Guide.

Seriously. I can not believe that the news media isn't doing at least that.

Now I have my son, calling about his girlfriend (and soon to be finace, I'd guess). She's up in the Fallbrook mandatory evacuation area. That's right she's in it. She and her parents won't leave. They are waiting until the fire gets close. He's stuck in Riverside, can't talk her into leaving, and can't get any useful information from the media to use to get her to move. I can't get anything either. So frustrating, when you know the data is there, just not shared.

Dean said...

KT, You took a post right out of my fingers. The .pdf of the Witch creek fire perimeter posted at signoffsandiego this morning was very helpful. It showed the fire still to the east of Ramona!

And why don't we cut firebreaks in our hill and mountain country in East County?

Its almost as if we invite disasters like this.

I'm beginning to feel that same bile rise in my throat that I did 4 years ago. Time to go. Thanks.

Rose said...

My friend's Dad lives in Fallbrook, and was evacuated this morning. Last anyone heard he was sitting in standstill traffic on a road full of thousands? of people all trying to get out. She doesn't know how to find out if he is ok, but if people are staying maybe it isn't as bad as we imagine from way up here.

I have two kids in LA (UCLA, Santa Monica), they say they are not affected yet - I don't know enough about the geography or the proximity to know if I should worry... The pictures on the news look like hell on earth.

Kelly the little black dog said...

KT,
I found another map and posted it. It was originally a PDF. My parents just evacuated.

bwebster said...

Our site (http://and-still-i-persist.com) went down a little while ago due to bandwidth issues; we're moving to a dedicated server and should be back up by around 2 pm PDT. ..bruce..

Anonymous said...

The local public tv/radio station, KPBS has one of the best maps of the fire I've
come across. They lost their transmission tower in the Mt. San Miguel part of
the fire and they seem to making up for the inability to transmit TV and some
radio with an excellent on-line presence. They have a twitter page and a google map with
recent updates.

Robert Smit said...

Yes, the maps of San Diego are quite descriptive at various media. But also a better way of fetching information can be the one you find at San Diego reference site (http://www.sandiegolocalguide.com).
Do try it.