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

Fire Evacuees

[jcicora]

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!

Big One

[Cally]

I've always been interested in the incipient Big One ever since the meme that it was due in 1976 and is now overdue went around. As the amount of critical infrastructure situated in and around SoCal has exploded along with the ubiquitous internet / cell connectivity, I can't help thinking that things are going to get pretty ugly when it comes, even if most of the actual buildings stand up and initial casualties are low, because of the density of comms and their upstream dependencies (power, transport links for service engineers, net ops and NOCs that maintain rather than going home to try digging out relatives, etc.

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.

Please use Text Messages

[DaveLatham]

I think one important thing that was hinted at by the summary, and mentioned more explicitly in the article is this:

Is everything working as it should? Any glitches?

...The one message local media could have been better communicating is for evacuees to use cell phones only when they are necessary and then to try and limit the use to texting.

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.

Re:Now that's hard core

[evilviper]

The guy is literally running for his life to escape wildfires, yet has the brass balls to 'fire blog'. If that's not worthy of a nomination to Geek of the Year, I dunno what is.

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.

Lack of Fire Breaks

[Ex-MislTech]

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