Jim's Blog Ramblings about novels, comics, programming, and other geek topics

Resources for the Firestorm 2007 Aftermath, San Diego

It looks like some of the fires are beginning to die down and the hopefully the worst is over. There's still a few fires burning and several thousands that cannot yet return to their homes.

I was fortune enough to have escaped the evacuations this year. However, a few of my friends were evacuated from various parts of the county. The fires did come very close to my previous condo in Spring Valley (near the Sweetwater Reservoir) where I was living just a few months ago before I moved downtown.

As anyone who browsed my other articles or article categories can discern, I'm not a fire fighter, news blogger, or a blogger who writes about local events (except for the occasional San Diego photo).

I'm going to post a few more helpful links and hopefully you'll find these as useful as the last set of links. After a week or so, I'm going to try to resume my normal writing of programming and miscellaneous stuff that interests me. For now, I'm going to keep these two posts at the top of my blog in case anyone arrives here from another web site.

Link to original article San Diego Fire Resources.

Helpful Links for the Aftermath

Official Information

• San Diego County Emergency Homepage
• San Diego County Road Closures (SD County Public Works office)
• List of San Diego Power Outages and map (via SDG&E)
• School Closures & Info: SD Unified, SD County Office of Edu, CBS8

List of Burned Homes

• List of damaged homes (via Union-Tribune), also a map showing icons of each damaged home
• List of destroyed homes (via CBS 8 San Diego)
• List of destroyed, damaged homes (via NBC 7 San Diego)
• List of fire damaged homes (via City of San Diego)

Health

• Air Quality (via County of San Diego)
• Instructions for Safe Cleanup of Fire Ash (PDF, via American Lung Association) 
• Relief Tips for Dealing with the Air Pollution (via American Lung Assoc. of California)

List of Disaster Relief Organizations & Charities

• Salvation Army (serving San Diego, San Bernardino, Imperial, and Riverside Counties)
• Red Cross (serving San Diego and Imperial Counties)
• FEMA (California Wildfires)
• San Diego Blood Bank
• Volunteer San Diego

Some tips for now & later

• Quick reference checklist (after a fire) (via FEMA)
• Wild Land Fire Preparedness (via County of San Diego)
• What to do after a wildfire (via FEMA)
• Creating Defensible Space and Landscaping Resources, (via Fire Safe Council of San Diego)
• Replace your HVAC/furnace filter (please just try to buy one now and come back to the local hardware store to buy extra in a few weeks/months so everyone can get at least one new filter)

Meta blogging

Initially, I posted the San Diego Fire Resources article for myself and a few friends. Somehow, the article started to spread and 48 hours later the page had received over 11,000 page views (and still climbing).

Early on, the team at KTVK TV (Phoenix, AZ) added a link to their front page. And to my surprise late on Wednesday (Oct 24, 2007), Brian Williams' MSNBC Nightly News linked to the article along with ABC 2 (Baltimore, MD), PBS, WAVE 3 NBC (Louisville, KY).

This was interesting, since the article was never submitted to any search engines and just spread via word of mouth and a few links from fellow bloggers. On an average day, the site was getting about 30-50 views/day and occasionally bursts of around 200-400 views/day when a programming article link was published on another site.

Thanks

There's a lot of great bloggers out there that provided excellent and live coverage of the firestorm and I'd like to thank you guys for the coverage and information that you've provided. Even the local newspaper moved to a blog to distribute information because their web servers became overloaded. The web community has also provided lots of opportunities to volunteer and help out.

Update 1 @ 10/24/2007 10:15 PM: Added link to Safe Cleanup of Fire Ash and Relief Tips for Dealing with Air Pollution