I think that Machiavelli may have said this.  ..bruce w..

Sadly if the wind starts to blow some mental case will likely set a fire just to watch it go. We will be keeping tabs on conditions, and in the event that San Diego once again is threatened by fire we will try to put out the word on where and how fast.

Lets hope it does not come to pass.

Jerry also pointed out a National Academies report chaired by Calit2′s Director, Ramesh Rao, entitled Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery (you can order it at the link just given).

Jerry and Calit2 are putting together a site with copies of web-based content (such as ours) that provided information during the fires. If some of the rest of you who were running sites during the fire would be willing to have copies of your fire-related posts on that site, drop me a line, and I’ll give you Jerry’s contact information.

On a vaguely related note, I’ve moved the San Diego Fires blogroll below the regular blogroll, since the fires appear to be good and out. I’ll leave on the blog for the time being.  ..bruce w..

The discovery of a possible pipe bomb alongside Interstate 5 in the Torrey Pines area forced a complete shutdown of a stretch of the heavily-traveled route for more than an hour Friday, authorities said.

Police found the object on the southbound side of the freeway near Genesee Avenue in the late morning, according to the California Highway Patrol.

Officers initially shut down one lane and several connector ramps and called in a sheriff’s bomb squad, the CHP reported.

In the early afternoon, authorities shut down the entire interstate between I-805 and State Route 52 while the explosives experts used remote equipment to destroy the object, a dispatcher said.

The closure led to stop-and-go traffic along the freeway for miles.

About 3 p.m., the southbound side of I-5 was reopened, CHP public affairs Officer Larry Landeros said.

Go to the link above for current details. From the updated version of the article, it appears that the device may have been thrown from a car while a police chase was underway.

While the I-5 freeway is now open again in both directions, here’s the section that was closed for a few hours this afternoon (the blue marker indicates approximately where the device was found):

Just what you want during Friday afternoon rush hour in San Diego — a major freeway closure like this. Ouch. On the other hand, with the chance of another Santa Ana condition this weekend (albeit milder than a few weeks ago), I’m sure the various officials involved felt they couldn’t take any chances. ..bruce w..

• A map showing the extent of the fires, including the ability to see where each started and how widespread it was at key points, with some data overlays (population density, median home prices)
• A Google map showing houses burned in the fires (with a separate link to a list of known destroyed houses)

..bruce w..

My biggest gaffe in all this was not anticipating the bandwidth issues — or, more precisely, expecting our web hosting firm to contact me before shutting the blog down completely, as they did at around 11 am PDT on Tuesday, October 23rd. At that point, we had over 1,400 people online simultaneously and had had over 3,000 hits the previous hour. Once the firm took us off-line, I called up with a credit card, let them know the critical nature of the information we were trying to get out, and asked them to get us moved up to a dedicated server ASAP. That took a little longer than they originally projected — about 3 hours instead of 2 — but that’s where the problems left my control.

Around the end of those three hours, the web hosting firm sent me the updated domain name server (DNS) information for the domain registrar. This DNS info clearly had problems with it (the IP addresses of both DNSs were identical, which Network Solutions promptly rejected), and I immediately replied (via e-mail) to the tech support group — but it would be another five (5) hours (and additional e-mails, plus at least one phone call) later before I got an “oops” e-mail from them with the correct DNS information. Even after I updated my domain name with the new DNS information, the blog still wouldn’t come up. I thought it might have to do with DNS propagation, but after a few more phone calls, it turned out the web hosting firm never re-enabled the PHP script that they had disabled to shut down the blog in the first place. Once they did that, the blog magically reappeared — at around 9 pm PDT, some ten hours after being shut down during the most critical day of the entire fire. In short, a good 7+ hours of our downtime was due to errors on the part of the web hosting firm.

I’m still hacked about this, in case you can’t tell, all the more so because at least one kind soul with plenty of bandwidth contacted us and offered to host our blog shortly after we went down on Tuesday. I considered it, but relied instead on the 2-hour estimate from my web hosting firm. Sigh.

Tremendous credit has to go to all the other web sites that were likewise doing their best to post information. The CalFire and San Diego County Emergency websites were struggling with the load on Monday and Tuesday, but had scaled up by Wednesday. The Sign On San Diego Fire Blog (run by the San Diego Union-Tribune) was my single best source of  timely information about fires, and I cited and liked to them in most of my fire-related posts. Bruce Henderson has already discussed at length the sources and methods he relied upon, particularly in doing his spectacular 3-D visualizations of the various fires. And, of course, there were the various blogs (bonbonio.org, Cat Dirt Sez, My Simple Life, and The Scratching Post, among others) also covering the fires, to whom we linked and who linked to us.

Most of the feedback we’ve received from readers has been positive to the point of embarrassment. You can see a lot of it in the public comments left on the SD Fires posts, but we’ve received e-mails as well. I’ve gone through and tried to extract comments that show why the blog was of use during the fires, particularly in comparison to other sources of information.

Now that you have the attention of so many of us, I would hope that you use your forum to educate people.  Different building and terrain conditions create different fire conditions. It would also be great to see more specific information on the “shelter in place” construction, vegetation and landscaping standards that Bruce H posted about.  The article referenced does not really give specifics.

I am from the Jesmond Dene area of Escondido but I have recently graduated college and moved to Texas…I found your website to be the most effective in keeping up to date with recent information on the fires and direction and there path of travel. I even let my parents know about your site even thought they are there they need to be in tune with info.

Your site has been an amazing resource for those of us who live in SD County.  Fortunately for me, the fire was never alarmingly close to my home (in Vista), but I didn’t know that until I saw your site.  You are doing something truly useful, and I admire that, partly because I aspire to do something truly useful myself, and know how much goes into it (both the direct effort, and the time it takes to cultivate the required skills to do something useful.)

I’m [from] a tiny town near Tacoma WA.  My sister lives in Coronado, CA, in San Diego Bay — she never appreciated the benefit of the sea-water moat around her island-town before this week.  I have a friend whose mom’s Rancho Bernardo home survived the fires by 1/2 mile.  And I love maps and was so frustrated at the lack of detail or map info from SD news sources early on (when signonsandiego.com wasn’t totally bogged down) and moreover from national TV:  all they showed was flames and more flames, no maps.  I’m absorbed and my heart is wrung by the unfolding story but I’m at work so haven’t had a lot of time to delve into every blogsite out there.  Yours put a human (and horse) face on the experience while providing so much map understanding!

I just want to say thank you for the hard work you all have done, the dedication and persistence, and for sharing it with all the rest of us.  This has been a valuable resource for keeping up from afar with developments down thataway for farflung folks like me, and I’m confident it was an anchor in the fog (smoke) for locals trying to parse out what their risk was and moves should be. So interesting to read references today to Bruce-the-map-guy’s intel outlook, and also the confirmation that’s what his training/experience at some point was.

By the way, it was an eerie experience when your website went black for all that time on … Tuesday?  The days muddle.  I’d found your great maps and site and was checking it every 4-5 hours;  sent links to a few folks for them to see too.  Then suddenly it wasn’t there, and I could only speculate that something bad had happened to wherever the server was — power outage, burnt up, something bad.  I thought that Horse Bruce might have had to evacuate but that wouldn’t have made the general site go down unless it was hosted at his house which was burning.  I was mystified and certainly was hoping for the best.  Had no idea it was the problem of pulling the plug because of overload of hits!  I had googled “San Diego fire map” and stumbled on your site.

First, I just want to express my gratitude toward you and the others; your efforts are deeply appreciated, much more so because it didn’t take a committee and a consensus; just expertise and good hearts.

For the future, there should be someone like you at the head of every disaster; an information specialist who sits at the top of the organization, but whose sole purpose is to gather and disseminate useful information.  Imagine if you had been sitting at the command center, hearing from the firefighters in the field, knowing where the hot spots were and able to disseminate the information almost in real time.

If there are legal and/or regulatory hurdles to such an effort, they should be analyzed and dealt with and proper legislation proposed.  E.g., you can’t be sued and taken for all you’re worth.

Perhaps you can market yourselves as consultants available in such an instance; start a professional organization for others of such ilk.  Consult with governmental agencies and get the structure set up ahead of time.  given the terrorist threat [ho-hum], this is a piece of the puzzle that would help a lot of people if it’s ever needed.

Thanks for your coverage of the SD wildfires.  I’m a San Diego native who’s currently in Nashville, TN.  My family is still in San Diego, so your blog has been a welcome source of information – especially with the flakiness of the CalFire website.  Thanks again for what you’re doing.  The coverage has been top notch.

You guys give the hard facts and info needed. Basically what the media is providing is pretty WEAK compared to you.

Your valiant efforts at ‘mashing’ fire info into concise statements and useful maps is greatly appreciated!

You guys could teach the emergency services a thing or six about coordinating and mashing – to the benefit of all.

Again… great work!  Be very proud of how much aid you provided to many worried folks!

Bruce, many thanks for your great website.   I live in NY and it’s been a tremendous relief to be able to follow breaking news, see evacuation areas and fire zones via your pictures and maps.  My sister and friends live in Encinitas/Rancho Santa Fe areas, some very close to edge of the fire.  I was distressed yesterday when you were down but happy now to be in touch again.  That list of homes sent chills down my spine this morning.  Good luck to all out there.

Thanks for the fire tracking on your blog.  Hard to get information better than this, even around here.

My mom is in PB at one of the hotels she owns.  She’s pretty certain that her house in Rancho Santa Fe is doomed based on what she’s seen on TV.  Do you know of any way to determine addresses or neighborhoods in specific areas that have burned?  Seems unlikely but, like Roseanne used to say, “You no ask, you no get!”

You get the idea.

It’s been quite an interesting run, but things are quickly returning to normal around here:

Still, if you go to Google and type in witch creek fires, our blog comes up at the top of the list. That is a credit to Bruce Henderson, who managed to create outstanding and useful visualizations of these fires while having to move his horse around and worry about possibly evacuating himself, his wife, and his cats.

We all hope nothing like this happens again any time soon.  ..bruce..

As noted in the previous post, I solicited feedback on what the media, the government, and we ourselves could have done better in responding to the San Diego fires. Here are some of your comments about the goverment response (click on ‘Read the article’ to get to them); on the whole, they were more positive than the feedback about the media.

From one reader:

For the future, there should be someone like you at the head of every disaster; an information specialist who sits at the top of the organization, but whose sole purpose is to gather and disseminate useful information. Imagine if you had been sitting at the command center, hearing from the firefighters in the field, knowing where the hot spots were and able to disseminate the information almost in real time….

I really don’t know what state, local governments could have done better. From my viewpoint, the reason there was such little loss of life is because they were proactive in evacuating areas in danger. It takes a lot of guts to order evacuation of 500,000 people, but they did it and hardly anyone died. I know there are a lot of people getting too annoyed [spitting on and cursing police/MP’s keeping them from their homes] because they don’t understand why they should be kept away. Assuming there is a good reason, it should have been better communicated; there’s no reason for people to get so upset if there’s a reason for what they’re doing. And people who needed to get back and feed animals left behind should have been allowed to do so, especially if there is a way to get a few people in safely, as opposed to opening the floodgates. So better coordination of information is a need there, too. I suppose an information czar would need access to all the local governmental operations as well. People on the blogs were endlessly confused; I’ve received a reverse 911 call; does that mean I have to go now? Am I in an evacuation area? I heard we can go back from this source, but this other sources says no; what’s the real story? Where is the fire?

And from another reader:

I can relate to your comments about how an official does or feel they
must respond to events. The fundamental issue (IMHO) is the relationship
between the government and the people. We seem stuck between two
ideas…the old idea that the leaders are like our parents and have to
protect us (even from ourselves), and new idea, promised to us by the
Founding Fathers- that we are the government, that the government is
controlled by the people and serves the people.

Unfortunately it requires us to be up to the task of governing ourselves so
they don’t have to. If we could do that, we would be able and willing to
give our representatives direction, and to demand that they follow that
direction without getting distracted by propaganda and shiny things. As it
is now, officials have to guess what we want (or guess what they can get
away with), and when they’re wrong, the retribution and blame follow.

If we could give them clear direction, there would be no need for blame, and
therefore no need for the constant CYA approach.

And another:

In situations like that of Monday, graphic information on exactly where a fire is and how it’s moving is extremely important and very difficult to come by for someone like me, concerned at a distance about the safety of loved ones.

The usual emergency information sites were very slow and not very informative, at least with updated information in a rapidly-changing situation. One such, after taking several minutes to come up late Monday, provided; “We have a fire situation in the county”. Very helpful, eh??!!…

You guys could teach the emergency services a thing or six about coordinating and mashing – to the benefit of all.

And someone else, living in Temecula:

Yesterday (10/23) the [Temecula] city link sucked. People screamed bloody murder. Today they update it constantly, whenever something new comes up. Swift kick in the butt to get the political ass-weasels motivated, I guess.

From someone with actual background in forestry management and firefighting:

What citizens can lobby their governments to do: promote better inter agency cooperation! No matter what the disaster, this can always be improved. Figure out ways to get local CDF and Forest Service crews, who have more training and experience fighting these fires, involved earlier. In every disaster there are stories of jurisdictional disputes and agencies keeping territorial control over situations they can’t really handle.

Don’t rely on the FEMA or other federal response. If you look at what hapened in this series of fires, the people who died were already gone by the time the feds were called in. Cross-train local firefighters. Wildland fire suppression is a specialized study. Force your local governments to participate in regional disaster response and recovery plans (when you investigate this, you’d be surprised how many won’t). When people take an active role in solving their own problems, they can be quite effective: I reference the fantastic work done by the Palomar Mountain Volunteer Fire Department in saving so much on the mountain.

And from someone who evacuated out of Escondido:

what i wish the fire and emergency authorities could do is devote a few people to posting the most uptodate info possible to the web. my brother who volunteered for OCRACES this week, said the fire dept knows exactly where the fire is – its just not a priority to get this info out to civilians. the reverse911 system was a huge advantage. but i saw so many people on the sosd boards wondering just where the fire was, and in the absense of good information, concluding that they should stay put until told to get out. personally i think this kind of thinking needs to be changed becuse it puts people in harms way. i would rather have had the authorities say:

1) here exactly is where the fire is (to the best of their knowledge, which still would have been much more accurate than the other fire info we had which was 6-12 hours out of date. even accuracy to within 3-4 hours would have been much more valuable. i lost a lot of faith the maps when i realized the maps were really only getting updated 1x a day, sometime between midnight and 6am. and tha maps would stay the same all day long until midnight when you finally realized the fire had moved significantly furither. i realize that all staffing would be prioritied to put the fire out. but some staff should be assigned to public awareness, or at least to making data available. as you say, we have the technology. at a minimum if the data were made available, there are plenty of enterprising data engineers at large such as yourselves who can sift thru and post in real time.).

2) we recommend you leave now if you feel uncomfortable.

Finally, from the comments attached to the original post:

What could have been done better by state and local government in dealing with these fires?

The State needs to work on better preparation to release the spotter planes to guide available air tankers, or reexamine their policy on how air support for fires is handled. It sounded like a bureaucratic pissing contest that delayed getting tankers in the air before the winds really picked up… just my opinion.

…I suggest (although the logistics would be nearly ridiculous) that in future situations, the government blast wi-fi signals as far and as wide as possible. Laptops with wifi are getting cheaper and cheaper — although radio is easier to obtain, the Internet is a much deeper data stream.

So, to the questions. What could have been done better by state and local government in dealing with these fires? Having still been in San Diego County when the Cedar fire went through, I think the state and county governments really did a much improved job. I know folks from that fire who called 911 when they saw fire on a ridge from their house and were told there was no threat and it was under control. Thank God they had the sense to evacuate anyway. Their home was destroyed. So, the reverse 911 and proactive evacuation of even minimally threatened areas seemed to be a good decision, although I know some have complained about that. It seems there will always be something to complain about and something to point fingers at. Overall, it’s greatly improved from my perspective.

Certainly, the San Diego County Emergency Center is going to have to realize that people are going to use their web site as a critical source of information. Having the site continually time out and the maps failing to load deserves an F in functionality. I gave up even trying to get information from there.

Camp Pendleton’s web site also did not function well or provide continuous updates when the fires started there. Because of the nature of the families who live about the installation, it should be realized that people from all of the country are going to go to that web site for information. We cannot get information from local news. If the authorities (county) really want people to stay off their cell phones, they have to provide more quantitative information in a timely manner.

Finally, I’m going to put together a posting of suggestions made to BruceH and me, though mostly what we got was blush-inducing praise. Again, if you have additional comments you’d like to add, just post them here. ..bruce w..

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

“‘We’re burned over! We have a casualty and burns, we need help!’” Chaney recalled hearing. Three of the firefighters huddling together in the inferno gave him enough information to direct the helicopters. The fourth firefighter had disappeared, and the others feared he was dead.

The first to spot the victims was Michael Wagstaff, a contract pilot flying a helicopter tanker for the U.S. Forest Service.

What happened next, according to firefighters who witnessed it, was one of the most heroic acts in a week of many.

Wagstaff landed on a smoldering patch of scorched ground long enough for the firefighters and the son to pile on board. The father had died in the flames. Chaney, flying above, put out a call for medical help.

“They are heroes,” said Ruben Grijalva, chief of the department. “I have heard about the pilot and that it was a heroic effort. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of Medals of Valor that come out of this incident.”

More from the San Diego Union Tribune:

“Not really. No,” Wagstaff said in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of people do, and I’m grateful to that. But I was just doing my job.”

In his first public interview, Wagstaff, 48, shared his story while standing before his helicopter at Gillespie Field in El Cajon. He wore sunglasses and a tan pilot jumpsuit.

From one private e-mail:

The professional media? I didn’t hear the local radio/TV news, so I can’t comment on it, but in general, ALL of the media has forgotten how to report facts. They’re too interested in drama, tweaking people’s emotions instead. It seems what people felt was really helpful were the few blogs that focused on concrete information. For example, my sister lives in Del Mar, so I was trying to find information specific to the threat to Del Mar. While its fate was unclear, the best information available on specific conditions was from a guy named Bob who posted his observations from driving around and looking at things. The Google map from the local PBS station was also pretty helpful, but you didn’t know if you could rely on it, because it was so hard to come by specific information on where the fire actually was. I also heard people complaining about seeing the same stale information regurgitated again and again. If I had to gauge complaints from afar, I would guess that the media wasn’t nearly specific enough; they focused primarily on “gosh, look at this burning building; it’s terrible” instead of saying, there are three neighborhoods here under threat; 1, 2, and 3. here is what the firefighters on the ground are doing, and here’s what they think about whether it can be saved; houses on these three streets have been lost, and they’re making a stand here. Instead, they seem to be randomly driving around pointing at things. Standards are pretty low in all of the media; maybe it’s all those communications and business majors who seem to be in charge. [endless, rude pointless arguments SELL!] Whatever happened to hard journalism? Are any of these people trained to think of themselves as the Fourth Estate? Or just attention-seeking, ratings-seeking morons. [sorry, I’m ranting.] Where have all the brains gone?

From another reader, living in Rancho Santa Fe:

i would hesitate to use the word professional with the word media after what we had to endure this week. the problem in my view (as a professional journalist for almost 30 years) is that the news has become purely entertainment, and newscasters even consider themselves ‘celebrities’ — witness the caption running under one video image letting viewers know that larry himmel’s house had burned.

what was shown on tv — the only source we had access to until later in the week — were the sensational images of burning homes, repeated over and over again. there was little information about the fires, the direction they were headed, or other useful news that evacuated residents could make sense from. even the photojournalists in the field had nothing to offer — with the exception of loren nancarrow who actually would identify the direction he was looking or helped locate a familiar landmark for viewers to get their bearings.

at any rate, we gleaned more information (eventually) from websites like yours, and from relatives on the east coast scouring the internet, than anything offered up by any of the local news stations. the bottom line is that until these local entertainment bureaus (so programmed to look for something exciting to make their evening newscasts entertaining) actually get blasted for their lousy coverage, we will never get the sort of factual, useful reporting of news that sources such as your site provided so well.

This person is a bit more positive, but has some suggestions for improvement:

Regarding your questions about what the media can do better next time: They’ve definitely done a 180 from the Cedar Fires. That was an embarrassing feeding frenzy amongst them and I had to turn the TV off for some periods of time. (The internet is definitely the way to go this time!) The coverage on these fires was much more informative this time. But I do have a suggestion: HOLD A COMPASS WHEN YOU ARE BROADCASTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And/or KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To state that you’re looking at hills in San Diego, Otay, Jamul, RB, etc… and not know which way you’re facing is pathetic! (Obviously I’m a native). To not know the basic direction of major roads is disconcerting. To not know the difference between black smoke and white smoke is dangerous! They should take a crash course in FIRE 101. Seriously. But I’m sure the majorities of them are not natives or are fairly new to San Diego but it is useless to stand on the scene and be so general about your coverage; pick up a map!

A brief observation from another reader:

Late Monday night, CNN was not much better – endlessly re-running short video clips of flames with 6-hour old stories for the fifth time… and not a good map to be seen! As a former map graphics guy myself, I feel that a decent map conveys more of such desperately wanted information in a few seconds than an hour of yakking heads and constantly repeated, meaningless video clips.

A lengthy observation from someone who knows California wildfires:

I want to comment on your request for suggestions re what could be done better.

What I object to about the media is the habit of reducing every situation to a sound bite and labeling every event with a catchy banner. This started with the “Oakland Firestorm” of 1991. This misuse of the term “firestorm” rankles on those of us who were or are associated with the ranks of wildland firefighting. Here is what the term refers to in technical fire behavior language:

“Firestorm: Violent convection caused by a large, continuous area of intense fire. Often characterized by destructively violent surface in drafts, near and beyond the perimeter, and sometimes by tornado-like fire whirls.” (my italics)

This definition from Americanforests.org was taken from the national fire center site, www.nifc.gov/fireinfo/glossary.html It is a misuse of the term to call a whole fire a “firestorm” no matter how ugly it is. The news media created this misuse during the Oakland fire because some people were killed in actual firestorms, which are isolated and localized events in a raging fire where the “tornado-like fire whirls” literally suck all the oxygen up in the column and you can asphyxiate because the air is used up in the fire. Reporters took a term that some fire spokesperson used to describe an event in the fire and ran with it, calling the whole fire “The Oakland Firestorm of 1991″ and creating a new term that sounds appropriately scary, but has lost it’s meaning.

The reason why people should be educated to understand what “firestorm” really means is that many are at still at risk and live in areas where they have unwittingly created the perfect conditions for this to occur. Mt. Tamalpias and those who live in the hills of Marin are particularly vulnerable. This area has many narrow, winding hilly streets comparable to the area of Oakland that burned, that can barely support two way traffic, much less fire engines and a mass evacuation. Certain kinds of plantings, such as laddering of shrubs into eucalyptus tree stands are particularly prone to create lethal fire hazards. Add high velocity, squirrelly winds and tinder dry brush on these slopes and canyons and you have the ingredients for the true “firestorm”. People died in Oakland because they couldn’t get out of the neighborhoods where this was happening.

This is a different set of dangerous conditions from the Southern Cal experience of seeing the Santa Ana driven fire crown the ridge you can see from your back door, grabbing your kids and your purse and running out the front door and getting in your car just as the fire reaches the back of your house. (That happened in many instances in the Bel Air fire, and probably many others–some didn’t even have time to start their cars, but ran down the middle of the street.)

Finally, here are some extracts from the comments attached to the original post:

What could have been done better by the (professional) media?

Cover the San Diego area better. Malibu burns every year & those folks know it & can afford to rebuild without state or federal intervention. I also believe the media could spend more time focusing on positive aspects, like timely evacuations, well-prepared disaster plans, well-staffed evacuation centers and human interest stories and MUCH LESS on photo opportunities for politicians and trying to stir up trouble over response times and resoucrce allocation to keep themselves on the air… I get frustrated with all the negativity and finger pointing.

The national news media is a complete mess and I don’t pay much attention to it. It is only capable of the broadest generalizations and goes for emotion over substance far too often. It’s not their fault. The local TV media is too fixated on raw pictures and not enough on synthesizing data. The local radio media is pretty effective through its call-in function, but it requires a pretty skillful host and producing team. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the KPBS radio staff was also responsible for the best (or most linked) interactive Google Map.

What could have been done better by the (professional) media? As stated before, I think most of us would prefer actual facts over the drama/emotion. And really, visiting dignitaries take more resources than what they add to the equation. The professional media could stand a lesson from your blog with the maps, data and such. As in any given event, they can call in an “expert” to provide data/maps.

Next post: what government (local, state, federal) could have done better. ..bruce w..

One of the founding concepts behind my new software venture is that the current trend in IT is reaching a point of diminishing returns. One of the wonders of the past 20 years has been the power of the US economy, largely thanks to insane levels of worker productivity in this country. Much of that is directly attributable to the adoption of information technology by American companies to improve the efficiency of almost any task they do more than twice. The concept behind Boomerang is that the next big jump will come from making people smarter, rather than making it easier to order paper for the printer.

This means being able to discover and extract information from many different sources automatically, and have back end machines and programs that can shape this information into a form where it can be combined and re-combined based on topics of interest. For those readers with a background in the Intelligence Community, it’s the classic All-Source problem and how do you let everyone know what is going on without swamping them with a million details so that the message is lost.

We have built several really interesting systems using this approach, known more widely as “Enterprise Mashups“, and many of the ideas of how it works and why it matters stem directly from earlier work on DoD projects such as DCGS (opens a PDF).

On Sunday October 21st, our first clue that something was going on came with the wind that was blowing strongly from the east. The slight but unmistakable smell of a brush fire. The first question on everyone’s mind is – where is it and where is it going? Flipping between the local stations yielded a lot of football and no information.

We needed to decide quickly if the horses in the eastern hills near Valley Center would be threatened or not by this fire. Checking the local news paper’s web site resulted in little or no information. Checking the California Department of Forestry was scant to none. Waiting to be told there was a problem was asking for trouble. What was needed was “Situational Awareness” of the threat now and the projected threat a few hours out, and we were low on data to feed that decision.

We had heard the fire was in Ramona, and we knew how the wind was blowing. We also knew some information about the terrain. Using a combination of Google Earth, physical maps and our knowledge of the burn pattern in 2003, we started laying out what we knew, what we suspected and what we though the fire would do next. We made the decision there was a very real threat to the stables and mobilized people to evacuate the horses, several hours ahead of the official word to move out from the County.

Throughout the first 2 days of this fire, information resources could not handle the stress of people trying to access them over the web. The entire information structure started to buckle. It was at this point I decided that based on what we knew from listening to AM radio, scanners and what news we could get that it should be possible to display where the fire was and where it was headed. I did what any intel guy would do, I started making maps. Just by whim I published one to the web site, and people were drawn to it. So much so that we got our web site temporarily knocked off line.

It cannot be stressed enough the importance of getting accurate, condensed information in the hands of everyone as quickly and directly as possible. The web is an outstanding resource for doing that, but the tools to do it quickly and easily are lacking.

Some of the best source of data that were used:

Pacific Southwest Research Station – These are the guys who were suppling the infra-red data that I was overlying on Google Earth with such great results. If I were President or Governor I would buy them a pair of Predator UAVs to boost their capability. The proved they could deliver results in a time of need, and they are the best bet (in my book) to move forward.

San Diego Union Tribune – They were a bit slow on the up-take, but quickly got in gear putting out information. Specifically there were some false starts with their Fireblog, that they eventually got off of their network and onto a high capacity server.

Cal Fire – This web site folded like a lawn chair for the first 2 days under the traffic, and did not have much useful detailed information until the 2nd or 3rd day. Suggest California think about whether this is fulfilling its intended mission. It’s saving grace is it gave me the rough parameters of the Witch Creek Fire late Sunday night after trying to load it for over an hour.

San Diego County Emergency – Another web site that quickly imploded under the network traffic. They even started publishing detailed PDF maps towards the end of the second day. I am hoping they are still smarting after their failure for the first 36 hours and someone in power will build that site out to what it should be in terms of content generation and capacity.

Google Maps – Three cheers for Google Maps and the community around it. Early on all kinds of people got just as frustrated as I was about what was going on and the lack of information around it. We started making maps on Google and sharing them. The software allows you to combine multiple maps in one view. This made it easy for people like me to combine knowledge from many people at once and create a common view. The only down side is you sort of had to know what you were doing to get really good results out of it.

KPBS – Knocked off the air early when the fire took out their broadcast antenna, they made some of the more detailed Google Maps of this event. Well done.

Tools that handled the load:

Google Earth – Decent visualization tool for 3D terrain and geo-spatial data. KML file format was very helpful in swapping data with other people watching the fire.

Mars Edit – Blog (for the Mac) posting tool was my front end to the web site. Proved itself as a huge help in quickly creating posts with a large amount of graphical data easily.

Word Press – The Blog software that runs this site. A few strange quirks under load but did ok.

OmniGraffle – Mac based drawing tool that I used to annotate the maps and visualizations. Good stuff all around.

Thanks again for reading this blog and supporting us.

Bruce

Some of the maps and visualizations we produced…

October 22nd

October 23rd