Reporting on the San Diego County fires

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-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.

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 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.

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.

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.