This summer i’ve been up in the mountains most of the time at my family’s cabin in Trinity County. It’s a nice space to work from, pretty woods, a pond, cabin, wifi, etc.. But one thing about living out in the woods you have to worry about are forest fires. Those big nasty fires which eat up tens of thousands of acres. There’s a lot to say about how bad forrest management practices have been the cause of a lot of problems. It’s true, a regular low burn cycle is better than letting all of the fuel load build up. The thing is, towns and buildings don’t take nicely to regular low level burns. So the forests build up load, and we get much bigger fires.
Finding information about these fires can be hard. They cross many different government agency’s land and getting news out about where the fires are can be difficult. Most government agency websites are the products of their large bureaucracies and are kind of clunky. In years past i never did find a good place for authoritative information. Now that problem has been solved. There’s a rails app which brings together data from 9 government agencies in to a clean, easy to navigate site. It’s got feeds for each fire and google map integration. I love it.
Check it out, Inciweb for all of your wildland fire needs!
There’s a new fire near our place. The Pigeon Fire which i’m concerned about. It’s on the other side of the river, but still close. The closest towns are all under mandatory evacuation. Hopefully it doesn’t jump the river and move towards us.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Great job on the site. One suggestion, add GeoRSS to your output feed. Then people can use mapping aggregators to display and filter the information by location.
September 5th, 2006
Reply to “Rails Fire Tracking Site”