Here’s how you can track California’s wildfires

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Map of California’s top 10 fires: Mendocino Complex becomes largest ever As the fire season drags on, with the Carr, the Ferguson and the Mendocino Complex wildfires wrecking havoc from one end of Northern California to the other, keeping track of it all can be overwhelming. What’s burning where? Which fire exploded overnight? Where have firefighters finally corralled a destructive fire event?

Fortunately, there’s a whole slew of tools you can use to keep an eye on the progress of these wildfires that, even though they may be hundreds of miles away, can and do affect the lives of many more Californians than just those living in the fire’s path. Smoke from the Carr and Ferguson fires, for example, has drifted into the San Francisco Bay Area miles to the southwest, blurring the region’s ridgelines, bringing beautiful sunsets and very bad air to the area.

We’ve assembled a toolbox for the amateur fire-tracker that includes small local news-gathering operations that supply real-time and detailed information on fires far away from us; official firefighting websites that provide regular updates on California’s blazes; and online tracking tools like the city of Redding’s 360-degree aerial maps of fire areas that take the viewer right down to the granular level showing whose house burned down and whose didn’t.

Cal Fire

Here’s the first stop for any wildfire-curious Californian. As California’s primary firefighting agency, Cal Fire, which is short for California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, is dedicated to the fire protection and stewardship of over 31 million acres of California’s privately-owned wildlands. The agency’s website is chock full of valuable and updated information on the latest incidents, including things like red-flag warnings and how to get ready for an approaching wildfire. Cal Fire also provides varied emergency services in 36 of the state’s 58 counties via contracts with local governments. The Department’s firefighters, fire engines, and aircraft respond to an average of more than 5,600 wildland fires each year, fires which burn more than 172,000 acres annually.

Go to the Cal Fire website, click on the Incident Information tab on the right side of the homepage and that will take you to an index of all the current-year fires that Cal Fire has battled, starting with the most active ones at the top. Each incident includes the fire’s name, location, acres burned, percentage contained, firefighting assets devoted to the incident, evacuation information and much more. This site is a one-stop resource for anyone interested in the state’s wildfires, with incident reports updated twice daily, in the morning and then again in the late afternoon. Heck, you can even find out where the next Cal Fire equipment auction is going to be, in case you’re in need of a hatchet or hose.

The City of Redding’s Aerial Maps

The city of Redding, which was severely impacted by the Carr Fire earlier this year, recently introduced a tool that citizens can use to view detailed 360-degree aerial maps of fire-damaged neighborhoods around town. The maps were created as part of a multi-agency collaboration, using licensed UAV pilots from the Menlo Park Fire District, Alameda County Sheriff, Contra Costa Sheriff, and other agencies to help the city capture the aerial photos.The City of Redding also got a hand from Cal Fire which permitted the use of its drone technology to assist in damage assessment from the air. You can find the maps here.

A recent review of the maps, showing neighborhoods burned in the northwest corner of Redding, reveal a startling snapshot of just how fickle a wildfire can be, leaving one house completely unscathed but burning its next-door neighbor’s house to the ground.

InciWeb

This federal interagency online-information management system was created in 2004 by the US Forest Service as a way for different agencies to share and coordinate information about wildland fire emergencies. Its role has since expanded to include other emergency incidents like earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. But InciWeb continues to offer rich and comprehensive updates on wildfires all over the country. The Ferguson Fire in Yosemite, for example, is being fought by an assortment of state and federal agencies, including the US Forest Service, so if you click on Cal Fire’s incident page to learn more about the Ferguson you’ll be automatically referred to InciWeb’s page on the fire.

Rough & Tumble

This California-focused news blog, which has been around for years, serves up “a snapshot of California public policy and politics based on the reporting from publications covering one of the world’s most diverse, trendsetting places.” It was launched by longtime political journalist and Emmy Award winner Jack Kavanagh in Sacramento and it offers an abundance of micro-local news updates from around the Golden State. That includes wildfires, of course, and the bounty of stories available on the site this week about fires shows how comprehensive and how helpful this service can be. No wonder it draws three million page-views a year.

Pulling from headlines on papers big and small around the state, Rough & Tumble links you straight to the people gathering wildfire news, often on the front lines. This morning, for example, the site connects you immediately to the San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee stories about the huge Mendocino Complex fires. It has updates from Martin Espinoza and Randi Rossmann in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, along with Joseph Serna, James Queally and Alene Tchekmedyian in the Los Angeles Times. There’s AP story about the firefighting volunteers, a piece from the Orange County Register about that region’s latest fires that have led to evacuations in two Orange County Canyons, another article explaining the origins of the names of the various wildfires now raging across the state, plus much more.

Record Searchlight

Redding’s newspaper, the descendant of the Redding Record launched in 1938 by the John P. Scripps Newspaper Group, has been a dependable source of updates on the Carr Fire that has been terrorizing the city for more than two weeks. Serving 30,000 readers, staffers on the small-town paper have aggressively covered the wildfire from the beginning and never backed off. On the paper’s website this morning, for example, were articles about the Carr and a staff-produced video showing workers picking through the remnants of the Lake Keswick neighborhood, badly burned by the fire. The video, which shows workers picking through the detritus of what was once a residential home, offers an intimate and heart-wrenching look at what a wildfire’s aftermath looks like, right down the tiniest ash-covered detail. The Record Searchlight coverage includes an interactive map that tracks the movement of the Carr Fire, which is being blamed for seven deaths.

Sierra Nevada Conservancy

Created into 2004 by a bi-partisan legislative effort, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy is a state agency whose self-described mission is to initiate, encourage and support “efforts that improve the environmental, economic, and social well-being of the Sierra Nevada Region, its communities, and the citizens of California.” The agency’s website also provides valuable resources during the wildfire season in the region, which is made up of all or part of 22 counties covering over 25 million acres. Beyond the daily updates and news releases on the fires, the agency provides a larger context of the bio-diverse Sierra Nevada ecosystem, including watershed analyses, river-cleanup projects and healthy-forest initiatives. The website gives visitors a 30,000-feet view of the breathtaking beauty of these mountains and helps put the wildfires into perspective.

TripAdvisor

This popular travel and restaurant app has created a “Yosemite Wildfire Info Clearinghouse” page for its users to consult and to contribute their own tips and advice to share with others in and around the now-closed national park or simply thinking of coming to visit. With confusion over when park officials will reopen Yosemite, TripAdvisor can be helpful as people on the ground can answer questions and address concerns of others looking on from afar. One user this week wrote: “I revised my trip down from 5 to 2 days due to the fire. I was hoping to visit on 8/13-8/15. If not in the Valley at least on some of the trails off Tioga Rd/Mono Lake area. Everyone has been telling me on these forums that it all should be open by my trip arrival. Does not look promising. Any thoughts on when things could be getting better?” The writer quickly received several messages from visitors near the park who were able to share the latest real-time information they had gathered.

Twitter

It’s a no-brainer, but this social-media platform is custom-made for events like wildfires. A search of #fergusonfire opens a stream of tweets about the latest conditions in and around Yosemite. From slick video updates produced by California TV-news crews to official tweets from the park’s administration to real-time real-people messages about the park’s current and expected condition, Twitter is a logical stop for anyone wanting to quickly get their arms around a sprawling, in-flux disaster like California’s wildfires.

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