On Monday 250,000 people in San Diego County were told to evacuate their homes, the number has since increased to 500,000 people. The whole county is at a stand still seeking information on radio, television and the Internet to see if they will be next to get a reverse 911 call, or to see how their community or friends and family’s community is holding up.
Before evacuating from East Chula Vista yesterday afternoon, I was building a list of San Diego Wildfire Resources but that proved difficult at first as San Diegans overwhelmed some local media and government web sites.
CDF Website
One of the first places I headed to was the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection website I clicked on the Fire Incidents link was redirected to a temporary page, apparently the CAL FIRE Incident Website is still down.
KPBS.org
KPBS was down for a short time, and then it was redirected to a temporary website on Digitaria’s domain. Once the site came back online Monday afternoon it was hosted on Amazon’s EC2, a web service that allows you to run your site on Amazon’s servers and increase compute capacity on demand. Whoever helped them set that up deserves some credit, KPBS also lost transmission from their radio tower on Mt. Miguel yesterday.
SignOnSanDiego.com
SignOnSanDiego had lots of information early on, and they even setup a fireblog but the main site started having problems in the middle of the day. Photographs and images are served off of a separate server, a smart strategy, that kept important information available throughout the day even when photos and images were offline.
UPDATE 8AM
SignOnSanDiego.com writes:
The site, which serves about 1 million page views on a typical day, delivered 6.7 million Monday and was on pace to serve 10 million yesterday, said Chris Jennewein, vice president, Internet operations for the Union-Tribune Publishing Co. The site added seven servers as of yesterday.
Thankfully, local media companies really stepped up their efforts and have kept us informed as the wildfires affect the whole county. This is in no way meant to pick on these websites, rather an effort to document this historic event.
