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!

Re:Fire Evacuees

[phantomfive]

Yeap, you're just a giant asshole. Putting out every single wild fire isn't necessarily good policy, but neither is letting people's houses burn down.

The firefighters know about fire management, and that in places like Yosemite the forest gets too thick when you try to put out fires too frequently. The Southern California fires are different though....they are largely grass fires, with grass that has dried out during the long summer. In addition the warm Santa Anna winds heat things up and push the fires along. So letting the fires burn one year will have little effect on the fires of the next year.

We help those people out because we feel sorry for them. Basically, if you can look at someone's house that burned down, and expect them to just live in the street until they can find somewhere else to live, you have trouble empathizing with people and should get some help. Don't matter if it's their fault or not; I done enough stupid things in my life that I can forgive someone else for doing the same.

Re:Subsumed?

[aicrules]

Maybe the cell network got bought out and integrated into a larger one during the fire :)

Isn't it great.

[Xest]

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 ;)

Re:Isn't it great.

[aadvancedGIR]

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.

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

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.

Re:Wireless Skype Phone

[Bryansix]

T-Mobile already has plans to do it.

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.

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

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.