Fire in San Diego and journalism

Well, it turns out that most journalists in San Diego do not know how to work. There is a major fire raging in the neighborhood (Witch Creek), yet the local news channels rehash news that are few hours old, and shut down for the night. Any professional worth his/her salt would have worked through the night during such a rare opportunity to show off the skills.

The county emergency site, http://www.sdcountyemergency.com/ , was completely down for more than a day. The other site, http://www.211sandiego.org/, is not faring much better. If more than few hundred dollars were spent on development, the tax moneys were wasted in both cases.

OK, so here are few pointers for clueless residents and journalists alike:

Nate's Twitter feed contains a lot of short extremely up-to-date messages about the fire. This is the best source for an up-to-date, but unverified information.

Fire/police scanning site (under heavy load now, but still working. Use MP3 Tune-in button in the third row): http://www.scansandiego.net

Another fire scanner by KG6FWO

Jim 2.0 blog, http://jamesewelch.wordpress.com/, contains lots of useful links.

The maps from the official source, http://www.sdcountyemergency.com/, are finally of good quality and up-to-date, yet huge and take long time to download.

A good map maintained through public input (by KPBS)

Satellite fire detection data (at least few hours late, still better than NBC and Fox. Already down at 8:30AM): http://www.firedetect.noaa.gov/viewer.htm

This map was very good: Unofficial Google fire map, now discontinued due to complaints from clueless folks.