Wildfire maps and media coverage

As I write this, a dense plume of smoke passes overhead from the “Paradise” wildfire in San Diego County. I am in the path of the fire, burning four or five miles away, but it will have to burn through a substantial section of Escondido before it reaches me.

Discovering where the firelines are at present, and the direction the fires are burning, is a hit or miss business. In part, this is the nature of the beast — the fog of war, to mobilize a metaphor. But I am amazed at the paucity of mapping resources being used by local media. Television news anchors are using hand-held Thomas guides and pointing to areas where fires are burning. Web and newspaper maps are vague at best.

And this is the center of GIS technology! There’s no reason at all that there shouldn’t be real-time updates of a GIS map showing firelines, areas that have recently burned, wind directions, areas at imminent risk, etc.

(By contrast, the mapping technology deployed by CNN and Fox during the Iraq war was state-of-the-art.)

After the crisis has passed, I will be writing ESRI (the ArcView company), the geography department at San Diego State, as well as county and regional authorities, urging them to develop an appropriate web-based graphic system.

But it strikes me that this is a measure of the immaturity of the internet and associated technologies.