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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!
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.
Maybe the cell network got bought out and integrated into a larger one during the fire :)
"Honey, the house is on fire!" "Grab the laptop!" "What about the kids and the dog?" "Screw them, I need my WiFi fix!"
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Isn't it great that technology like the internet has reached the point of acceptance that when peoples houses are burning down one of the main priorities is to ensure the shelter everyone has to hide in has wireless internet access and that people make sure they at least rescue their laptops and PDAs.
;)
I'm sure it wasn't much more than 5 years ago that people would look at you funny if you turned up in such a place and said "Right, where's the net access?".
Oh how times change
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
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
In the article he talks about his wireless Skype Phone. These things are really nice to have around. I have one at home since I don't get any cell reception there. I forsee that in 5 years all cell phones will just have this built in though.
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
how are the gas pumps doing through all this?
The ones that are not in areas under fire are fine
is there a gas shortage?
doesn't appear to be one; could be because so few people are driving
are they jacking up the prices on the highways?
you mean just over the past couple of days? no, but they're chronically jacked up anyway
is al gore going to relate this to global warming?
it is likely
is manbearpig responsible for it all?
quite possibly
I'm curious to read the after action reports - no more so than the folks living this nightmare. I'm curious to see how the local ham community participated in all this.
Using texting for 'Health and Welfare' messaging via WiFi at a shelter is great and the shelter folks are to be applauded for making that work so well! Such communications has traditionally been - at least augmented - by the amateur radio community. Was there still need/a place for this? Where they reachable by those dozen or so people who don't have texting cell phones or WiFi clients? Did the hams setup the WiFi access, coordinate it or what did they do?
Who knows - maybe now the SSB and CW enthusiasts will finally have to learn how to deal with TCP/IP, CAT5, WiFi and texting - in spite of the Jay Leno message race results.
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
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.
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 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
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.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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.