Good Sources of Maps and Data for the San Diego Fires Including the Witch Creek Fire

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.

Update: 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.

My parents had to be evacuated from the area affected by the Witch Creek fire. After we loaded up all of our cars and drove away, I spent a great deal of time yesterday struggling to find any worthwhile information at all about the fires. Most of the major news media sites are totally worthless. They're fixated on pretty pictures and videos. Here are some sites I've found that have good information.

PBS has a good Google map of the fire areas, evacuation areas and road closures.

Catdirt has been keeping up a great blog with liks to information, news conferences and maps.

The blog And Still I Persist has been doing consistently solid updates with links and maps for the last two days.

There are other local bloggers who are doing good work, but it looks like many of them are running their own servers and those are getting overwhelmed by site traffic. Signonsandiego has posted a map of the fire areas, but the thing is about 4MB and since everyone is trying to download it, almost no one can. I finally got through to it at about 0430 today and the stupid thing was worthless. No surface streets shown on it at all. Another !#%^&!@%#&^* map you could have made with crayons.

Some of the local bloggers with their own servers are posting hi-res photos on their blogs. That may look pretty, but it kills the server when a ton of people hit the site at the same time. The lesson learned here is that this is a bandwidth-constrained environment, sort of like infantry operations. You've got to distribute a common tactical picture over a very narrow pipe to as many people as possible. Make it clear, make it concise and make it current.

I'll update this throughout the day. I won't post any links to places to find photos, videos or school closures. That kind of stuff is all over the place and is of little value. School is closed. Fire is hot. It makes crackling noises when it burns. People cry when they lose their homes. There. I just saved you about five hours today.

My folks' house is right on the borderline of "estimated" burn areas. I'll say it again. This is pathetic. We've got private citizens using html push pins on Google maps and we have high-paid, smarmy, self-important news creeps giving us human interest stories and video interviews. I can't imagine what we'd be doing right now if we had to rely on the mainstream media.