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:Subsumed?

[aicrules]

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

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.

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.