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

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.