Toledo Talk - Reporting on the San Diego County fires (older version)

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Reporting on the San Diego County fires

KPBS Radio

KPBS Radio Problems

Oct 23, 2007

Breaking News: Fires in San Diego

KPBS Radio continues coverage around the clock.

KPBS Radio is off the air due to the fire on Mt. Miguel. Imperial Valley residents can get the signal at KQVO. We are hoping to be on 94.9 within an hour.

We apologize for the problems with our live stream. We are working on increasing the bandwidth for the stream. If you are connecting from outside of San Diego County, we ask you to please turn off the stream so that people within the county can access it. Thank you.

KPBS Twitter update at 10:49 a.m. EDT Oct 23 :

KPBS-FM will be available at the 94.9 frequency within the hour. KPBS Radio's signal was interrupted due to the fire on Mt. San Miguel.

KPBS Twitter update

Get our radio broadcast through San Diego's CityTV (Cox South ch 24/Cox North ch 19/Time Warner ch 22), and County Television Network.

KPBS Oct 24 update :

KPBS Radio is now available on 89.5 FM again.

Thanks to everyone for your messages about the Google Map. The map is experiencing sluggishness because of the huge number of people checking it, which is also affecting our ability to update it. Google is increasing the map's resources. We are working as hard as we can to update it, and have some collaborations in place to get some more recent and accurate data on there. Stay tuned.

Reverse 911

Reverse 911 Emergency Notification System

The Emergency Notification System allows the City to rapidly send telephone notifications to all residents and businesses in an affected area in the event of an emergency. An operator using the system can identify the affected neighborhood or region of the city and record a message that describes the situation. The system will automatically call listed and unlisted telephone numbers (including TTY/TDD) within the affected area and deliver the recorded message. If phone lines are busy, the system will attempt to redial those telephone numbers to make contact. If an answering machine picks up the call, the emergency message will be left on the machine.

Nov 28, 2007 NPR : Wildfires Gave Reverse 911 Its First Test :

The Reverse 911 communication system was given the lion's share of credit for successful and fatality free evacuations from San Diego County's wildfires a month ago.

211 was also used to disseminate info. Residents called 211 while Reverse 911 called the residents about evacuation orders.

SD County Emergency

San Diego County Emergency Homepage

National Incidents

Incident Information System showing fire containment updates.

Twitter Usage

Oct 22, 2007 Wired.com blog posting titled : California Fire Followers Set Twitter Ablaze

Twitter users Nate Ritter and Viss have been busy posting rapid-fire updates of the current wildfire situation in Southern California. Both of them are on the scene in San Diego, and they are doing an excellent job of providing information and news about evacuations, meeting points and anything important that local residents would need to know. Viss is also on Flickr and he's posting photos.

Nate and Viss are using the hashtag #sandiegofire. Twitter users can enter "track sandiegofire" in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.

Here's an excellent real-world example of the usefulness of Twitter's limited scope and feature set -- Reporting breaking news quickly. They're certainly filing updates more frequently than most mainstream media outlets.

To stop receiving twitter posts tagged with #sandiegofire, send message with 'untrack sandiegofire'.

Twitter Feeds

Oct 23, 2007 Wired.com blog posting titled Firsthand Reports From California Wildfires Pour Through Twitter

Oct 24, 2007 Wired.com blog posting titled In Disasters, Everyone, Not Just Bloggers, Should Use Twitter

Stephenson Strategies

Other Social Site Usage

Oct 22, 2007 story titled Firestorm 2.0 - Using Social Media Services to Track The California Fires

Nate Ritter

Oct 25, 2007 blog posting titled How Geeks Can Help In Disasters

Embedding Nate Ritter's twitter feed into this Web page with the new RSS embed feature at Toledo Talk. The twitter RSS feed, however, is not as current as Ritter's twitter Web page. Twitter's RSS feature really acts screwy sometimes.

KPBS Fire Map

Screen shot of KPBS's fire map created by its Web team, using Google maps :

Larger image

More online coverage

Oct 24, 2007 Poynter Online article titled CA Wildfire Coverage: Intriguing Online Approaches lists several more sites. Here are a few :

Flickr group, The Southern California Fires 2007 currently has 169 members and over 1500 images.
Housley in the House
Help in San Diego

Oct 25, 2007 - California Wildfire Coverage by Local Media, Blogs, Twitter, Maps and More

Oct 26, 2007 - Reviewing Union-Tribune's Online Coverage

Oct 31, 2007 - Traditional Media Evolves for Wildfire Coverage, But Hyper-Local Still Lacking

Network News in a Box

created by jr on Oct 23, 2007 at 10:02:34 am
updated by jr on Dec 08, 2007 at 11:06:39 am Comments: 8

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tags: technology citizenjournalism communications emergency

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