A Technology Report From A San Diego Fire Shelter

netbuzz writes "Retired journalist and mobility expert Jim Forbes is among the quarter-million San Diego-area residents driven out of their homes by the horrific wildfires. Forbes has taken the opportunity to 'fire blog' from his shelter and discuss via e-mail with Network World how his personal technology and the shelter's wireless networks are holding up under the strain. 'The shelter set up a dedicated computer room with an 802.11 a,b, and g network which worked like a charm. Lots of people brought notebooks when they left their home, so there was a whole lot of IM traffic in and out of the shelter. The local cell networks were subsumed by traffic early in the day so people were texting friends and loved ones a lot."

Comments

slightly offtopic

[mapkinase]

whoever follows fires in SD county, the map

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&ie=UTF8&om=1&msa=0&msid=114250687465160386813.00043d08ac31fe3357571&ll=32.990236,-116.732483&spn=1.105782,1.757813&z=9&source=embed

Subsumed?

[Anonymous Coward]

The local cell networks were subsumed by traffic early in the day

I do not think it means what you think it means.

subsume
1. to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one.
2. to bring (a case, instance, etc.) under a rule.
3. to take up into a more inclusive classification.

From Dictionary.com

Re:Isn't it great.

[LWATCDR]

Well considering that many people now keep their photos, home movies, and finical records in digital form taking your notebook is a lot like taking the photo album. My wife keeps two portable hard drives with all that stuff on it just in case.
Having the Internet in this case available is very useful. It allows you to contact your family and friends to let them know you are okay and to get news. During the Hurricanes the Hams where passing a lot of traffic just to let people know that there loved ones where okay.

The big problem is still evacuation routing. When Frances was coming my wife and decided that we would bolt. It looked like a CAT 5 at the time and that is just too big to risk.. Some friends headed out hours before us but took the "freeway" I took an old back road. They went less than 100 miles in 16 hours. Many people where in danger of running out of fuel on the road. We had no problems and went twice as far in less time. The problem is everybody will try and jump on the freeways and over load them. If one gets cut then you are in real trouble.

Re:Isn't it great.

[jollyreaper]

It might look funny from an external point of view, but when you stack hundreds of people in shelters for days, morale soon becomes a concern as big as logistic. Giving them a way to get independant information and communicate with the rest of the world and their families is a cheap but effective way of reducing the stress of the refugees. Communication is the best part. It's total chaos when you go through something like this. I went through the last three hurricanes that hit South Florida and I have to tell you, having a text-enabled cell phone was a great help. The cell towers are up and running before the landlines and text messages take up a lot less bandwidth than voice calls and your phone will keep trying to send until it gets a moment of access. In high volume cell situations, text always trumps voice.

I would say that part of any modern evacuation plan would be establishing web-based email contacts for all your vital parties, then knowing that this is the best way to communicate. It might be a while before you have access to a computer but there you go, you can reach your people.

Also, from a psychological point of view, it's just nice to know what's going on with your people. It was bad enough going throgh the storms but I would have really hated not having the TV and radio, not even knowing what's happening beyond my house. I couldn't imagine going through this kind of thing a hundred years ago, back when you didn't even know a damn storm was on the way until the wind started blowing.

300,000+ reverse 911 calls - plug for POTS

[IvyKing]

One of the great technology success stories of the ongoing fires is the number of people told to evacuate via reverse 911 calls. The bad news is that the calls only work for standard landline (and presumably cable_co phones where the number is tied to a specific address). In my case, I went to bed last night with a wired phone next to the bed - didn't want to depend on the power being on for the wireless phones.

One sign of the success of the program is that only one fatality has been reported so far.

Kudo's to 'Craig' for posting the information to Google Maps Sunday evening - that was the most informative source for info on the fire Sunday evening - pretty clear by 11PM that I wasn't going to work the next day (work was in a mandatory evac zone declared Monday morning).

Some of the technology that hasn't worked has been the local '211' website (absolutely worthless) and the San Diego Union-Tribune website yesterday afternoon - they finally fixed that by dumping a lot of the flash and hosting the news updates on Blogspot. The local TV sites had too much flash to be useful.

The winds out there turn "fire" into "blowtorch"

[CFD339]

I am a firefighter, though not in that part of the country. I can tell you that in that kind of wind, stopping any fire in even a single home once the wind can get in (windows broken, etc.) is going to be extremely difficult.

Embers larger than your hand can travel hundreds or even thousands of feet in that kind of wind and still be viable. These land on grasses and structures that have been dried over months then punished for days with these 90 degree, single digit humidity level winds. The winds are like a blow drier pointed at you face, on medium setting...for days.

In the great Chicago fire, people fled across the river -- and embers were able to cross that space to ignite structures on the other side. Not just embers, either. The fires create their own weather, creating vortexes that look like tornados hundreds of feet high. Pretty scary stuff. You're not going to slow it down with a garden hose on your roof, and you're not going to put it out with a fire truck and a couple of hand lines.

Re:Lack of Fire Breaks

[PhoenixOne]

Ex-MislTech are you out here? Can you see the teams of environmentalists yelling at fire crews not to cut fire breaks? No? Fuck off.

We have fire breaks, they're call freeways. They don't work. With 70+ MPH winds, you can't cut a break wide enough to stop these fires.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to cough up some black shit and then head back out to give blankets to people who just lost everything they own...