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A Technology Report From A San Diego Fire Shelter
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Oct 23, 2007 09:53 AM
from the wireless-during-the-worst dept.
from the wireless-during-the-worst dept.
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."
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Fire Evacuees (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Fire Evacuees (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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It's only going to take one change of ruling party, and a budget deficit, and some lobbying to persuade the government to sell off the land again.
Try telling that to the UK government which is proposing to build 2,000,000
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Doesn't help, unless you create a wide, non-flammable buffer zone of some sort. Otherwise, you end up with the situation we have in Orange County, where some whackjob started a fire out in the undeveloped hills, which proceeded to burn
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No one should live along the Gulf Coast, or the southern Atlantic seaboard, because they have hurricanes. Or California, because they have earthquakes. Especially not Southern California, because they have earthquakes and fires. Or the midwest, because they have blizzards. And tornadoes. And floods. Or Hawaii, because they have volcanoes. Pacific rim? Volcanoes and earthquakes. An
Lack of Fire Breaks (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_break [wikipedia.org]
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
Parent
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070822/ai_n19475884 [findarticles.com]
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Ex-MislTech are you out here? Can you see the teams of environmentalists yelling at fire crews not to cut fire breaks? No? Fuck off.
We have fire breaks, they're call freeways. They don't work. With 70+ MPH winds, you can't cut a break wide enough to stop these fires.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to cough up some black shit and then head back out to give blankets to people who just lost everything they own...
The winds out there turn "fire" into "blowtorch" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Now that's hard core (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Now that's hard core (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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That's true in much of California as well. Lots of mountain ranges. Right now, Arrowhead is burning. They get plenty of snow. Last year, maybe it was Big Bear (lots of snow). Maybe next year it'll be Silverwood. All three mountains, right next to each other, at the very North-end of the L.A. Basin.
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That said it's too bad there's not some government stockpile of 10k to 20k people willing to help out and defend the city. If only there was some group of people dedicated to helping out after/during natural disasters.
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It's easy and often perfectly valid to dismiss blogging as a self-induglent activity, but the fact of the matter in this case (and innumerable others), is that the information people need is spread between local news outlets, right-wing AM radio personalities (the FM folks are too busy rotating their playlists and offering commercial
Priorities CA (Score:3, Funny)
Dumbasses /. (Score:2)
"Honey, the house is on fire!" "Grab the laptop!" "What about the kids and the dog?" "Screw them, I need my WiFi fix!"
"Honey, there's a fire a few miles up the road. I've already got the kids and the dog packed up. Anything else we should grab?"
"I heard on the news that the cell phone network is having trouble with the load."
"Okay, I'll throw the laptop in the trunk. Anything else?"
"Well, we still have time..."
There, fixed that for you. I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed in the Slashdot readership for thinking the evacuations are being caused by people's houses instantly engulfing themselves in flames, or the sens
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It's one of the main selling points of monolithic domes. The second is the insulated coating that makes it extremely fire resistant.
http://www.monolithic.com/gallery/homes/braswell_fire/index.html [monolithic.com]
People who want to build houses made of *wood* in areas that regularly have wildfires should be laughed at.
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Sheesh CA, you're as bad as the people in New Orleans.
*Yeah, yeah, theoretically....
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Isn't it great. (Score:4, Funny)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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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.
Communication is the best part. It's total chaos when you go through something like this. I went through the last three hurricanes that hit South Florida and I have to tell you, having a text-enabled cell phone was a great help. The cell towers are up and running before the landlines and text messages take up a lot less bandwidth than voice calls and your phone will keep trying to send until it gets a moment of access. In high volume cell situations, text always trumps voice.
I would say that part of any mo
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You're missing the point (Score:2)
This is one lesson from the 2003 fires that was successfully learned.
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They need information about their loved ones and the celluar network isn't handling the load. 'Everyone' isn't running into burning houses and rescuing their computers. They're being evacuated because their
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Well considering that many people now keep their photos, home movies, and finical records in digital form taking your notebook is a lot like taking the photo album. My wife keeps two portable hard drives with all that stuff on it just in case.
Having the Internet in this case available is very useful. It allows you to contact your family and friends to let them know you are okay and to get news. During the Hurricanes the Hams where passing a lot of traffic just to let people know that there loved ones where
slightly offtopic (Score:5, Informative)
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 [google.com]
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And with MODIS / GOES satellite imagery... (Score:2)
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The green player should have allocated more resources for research.
His cavalry is outclassed by those tank units.
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Wireless Skype Phone (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why would they do that? Wouldn't it hurt the bottom line?
Re:Wireless Skype Phone (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Wireless with real time webcams of fire (Score:2)
http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/cameras/ [ucsd.edu]
It's called the High performance wireless research network. Firefighters and police have been using it for communications in past fires and are undoubtedly using this time as well.
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Big One (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ham Radio ?? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com] race results.
Please use Text Messages (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Unfortunately, with the bass-ackwards cell phone rate plans available in this country, voice minutes are included, while text messages cost extra.
300,000+ reverse 911 calls - plug for POTS (Score:4, Informative)
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.
As a IT professional, I would like to remind you (Score:3, Insightful)
That is all.
Good luck.
Re:Subsumed? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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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
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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