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Tracking the Crown Wildfire by Mouse
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 This is slick, and useful: You can track the Foothill Fire, the Crown Fire, and pretty much every other major wildfire in California with GeoMAC Wildfire Viewer, an online fire-mapping tool from the U.S. Geological Survey. (Spotted at LABlogs)
From a reporter's standpoint, it's a huge boon. Instead of stomping around in heavy boots looking for the fire's edges with a gimme cap on your head and a damp rag over your nose while firefighters in Scott Air-Paks and full-on Nomex are fleeing sensibly upwind, you can sit in a desk chair and follow firefighting crews working to stop the massive Crown Fire's advance toward Acton ...
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(Full disclosure: I covered wildfires extensively for the Times 10 years ago. I almost got killed with Times photog Bob Carey in the '91 Santa Barbara fire that destroyed more than 500 homes, spent nine days as rewrite editor on the 44,000-acre Thousand Oaks fires a few years later, and inhaled enough soot and melted enough boots over the years to burn the adrenaline out of my system. No need to relive any of it any closer than at the end of a mouse, which is why the Wildfire Viewer is so intriguing).
GeoMAC stands for Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination - a tool developed originally to help for fire suppression managers in the continental U.S. It went online to the public in 2000.
From a web design standpoint, the interface is rather kludgy, not entirely user-friendly, and the query response time is painfully slow.
But nitpicking aside, it's a powerful tool. You can overlay roads, watercourses, firefighting and thermal satellite data onto the maps of the fires' borders to get an unprecedented view of what's burning, what's at stake, and what stands between them.In order to give fire managers near real-time information, fire perimeter data is updated daily based upon input from incident intelligence sources, GPS data, infrared (IR) imagery from fixed wing and satellite platforms. The GeoMAC web site allows users in remote locations to manipulate map information displays, zoom in and out to display fire information at various scales and detail, including downloading desired information and printing hard copy for use in fire information and media briefings, dispatch offices and coordination centers. The fire maps also have relational databases in which the user can display information on individual fires such as name of the fire, current acreage and other fire status information. From a fire geek standpoint, it's fascinating and for homeowners in harm's way, it's indispensible - a much more comprehensive and reliable view of the battle than you'll get from even the best TV news report.
Further perspectives on the fires can be found in photos of the blaze near Santa Clarita and the latest AP coverage. Mercifully, no one's been killed or left homeless just yet.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - 10:13 PM
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