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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."
Well I say kudos to the people organizing the relief effort in San Diego. I think its great that they thought ahead to provide this kind of amenity to the people displaced by the ongoing disaster. This is the kind of project I would be glad to spend tax dollars on!
A morbid line of thought, I know, but I do BCP / DR planning for my employer and we had a recent brush with an unplanned disaster (loss of a critical site for two weeks, due to the UK floods in July) which was a very... "interesting" experience. It was interesting how resilient we were despite having to wing it and improvise under tight time pressure; however, we were very very close to the point where it would all have fallen to bits. If a certain electricity substation flooded there'd be no power (== comms, food distribution,...) etc for the whole County. The CEP contingency plan for that is "evacuate Gloucestershire". The moral is, it's all good as long as you've got power, food & water, and your critical employees can and are able to work without putting themselves at risk.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Is everything working as it should? Any glitches?
If you're in an emergency area, please minimize your voice use, and try to use text messages instead as they are much more lightweight on the cell networks. And pass the message on to those around you.
Bah! You clearly don't know California. Evacuating your home due to wild fires here is a lot like a road closure elsewhere... a minor annoyance you have to put up with for a few days, every couple years. Where your schools might close for "snow days", we have "fire days". Blogging about it is the most natural thing in the world... You have lots of time to kill.
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The real issue here is environmentalists will not let them cut fire breaks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_break
I understand them not wanting to cut it all down, but a few fire breaks in key spots
would help them fight the fire, and would slow its spread as well.
A few more water towers in the area on the tops of the hills would help them not
have to truck in as much water, and or a list of all ppl with swimming pools in the area.
The firebreaks do need to be fairly wide as the wind was a factor in these, as usual.
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
to back up any unique data right now and prepare it for transport.
That is all.
Good luck.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A number of things make this event really different from the katrina event. I'd say, everything combined has made this disaster go that much smoother.
People in San Diego have been very cooperative. The worst crime incident so far is a couple of teenagers "looting" for alcohol. Every report from Qualcomm stadium has been positive: donations of food and supplies were excessive that they have to tell people to stop donating. Plenty of shelters have been opened. Even pets are being spoiled rotten.
Part of the reason may be that most people are fairly well off meaning middle to middle-upper class and the general feel of San Diegans is "chill". It matches the typical weather patterns where people start complaining when the temperature gets too cold for tshirts and shorts. Another major factor is that San Diego has already been through another major fire disaster in 2003 called the Cedar Fire. Because of that event, the county was much better prepared to deal with a major fire disaster. All agencies have been communicating incredibly well, even to the degree that military support and even Mexican support is now integrated into the effort. There was footage today of military aircraft outfitted with water buckets to do water drops. The fire chief went on local TV and announced that they are getting additional help from Mexican fire engines.
Major changes to emergency procedures/technology such as reverse 911 has made communication with residents and coordination of evacuations much smoother. We received the reverse 911 call on our answering machine and the message clearly stated when the mandatory evacuation was in place and where residents should evacuate to. These calls are sent out well ahead and cover very large areas. If this happens in the future, I think most people will have well over an hour to pack their cars before they absolutely need to evacuate. Nursing homes and hospitals have also had plenty of time and cooperation with local officials to evacuate. The only people in immediate danger were those who refused to leave their homes until the very end. There have been a few cases of those, however, I think because those people actually wanted to stay, it kept many of the bad apples at home doing stupid things rather than causing problems in the shelters.
Another thing to be aware of is the fires only affect one area at a time and it is easy to see if you're affected. That is unlike a hurricane where entire large cities are affected all at once. The worst that happen in San Diego is one community gets evacuated to an evacuation center, and the next day that evacuation center has to evacuate even further. The fires move slow enough that people have enough time to figure out where to go next. Many people simply went over to a friend in another part of the county or booked a hotel 20 to 30 minutes away.
While there was plenty of time to evacuate, there is not plenty of time to move furniture or load your truck up with big objects. There is enough time to quickly prepare enough for a one week vacation, but you are still forced to look at all of your belongings and pick and choose between them. Some people had more time than others, but most people had enough time to think about getting the important papers, packing up some clothes, and picking a few important or favorite things. Many people also had enough time to move the cars out of garages and out to the street so they wouldn't burn if the house did.
The worst part of the entire disaster is knowing whether or not your place burned down. Watching the local news is like an evil lottery. If you win that lottery, you'll have the comfort in knowing your place burned to the ground, however, if you don't see your place, you're still in the dark and playing an evil game. Either way, you don't want to play or win the game. There's plenty of footage where a street will show a perfectly untouched house, but the two houses on both sides of it are completely gone.