Web savvy changing how fire bosses share information on wildfires

For Jack de Golia, the idea of issuing updates on wildfires by fax seems almost quaint. These days, the Forest Service spokesman prefers using the Web to post maps, fact sheets and anything else he thinks will help explain - as quickly and as often as possible - what a wildfire is doing and how firefighters are responding.

"There's been an evolution of information, and you have to keep up," said de Golia, who, from assignments in Montana and Wyoming this summer, has posted frequently to a new, experimental government fire information Web site, www.inciweb.org.

"There's a need for people to have ready access to information on fires," he added. "I think it's important, when people are very frightened or concerned, that they have as much information on an event as they need to make decisions."

Helen Frazier is an intelligence dispatcher for Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch Center in Minden. The center's Web site - www.sierrafront.net - posts updates on wildfires that are close to homes, or are burning out of control, including the Waterfall fire of 2004 and the Linehan, Jackass and Six Mile 2 fires this year.

"It's a way to get the information to all the media outlets that is consistent and accurate," she said. "The public wants to have that information."

The demands of today's information-now culture are changing how news about wildfires spreads.

But the rise of the Internet is also creating challenges for those who are the public faces of emergency and charged with delivering timely, accurate news, sometimes from remote locations and in environments where rumors can fly faster than hot embers. Errors - from wrong contact information to the mistaken alert that nearly one-third of a small Montana town's population was being evacuated because of a fire - have made it online in the past month.

"Things change so fast. It's hard to keep up - I don't care how many people you have - it's hard to keep up with all the information," said Maureen Oltrogge, a spokeswoman at Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park, where a wildfire earlier this summer cut off access to the canyon's North Rim. "No sooner than you push the button to send something out, it's already dated."

While the Internet has played some role in disseminating fire information at least since 2000, agency officials this year began to more aggressively push its use - in part recognizing what one information officer in Montana called "the reality of the world we live in."

It's not that community meetings, phone calls and face-to-face discussions with displaced homeowners, business operators, reporters and others will go away; officials say those are key in outreach efforts.

"There is no way we could be completely accurate," Frazier said. "We don't have all the specific information, but we do the best we can."

She said the most accurate information still comes from reporters going to the scene and collecting information first hand.

She said the Web site primarily serves to inform the public of estimated acreage of the fire, road closures and possible evacuations.

But the Internet is also important for reaching a broad and possibly growing audience, they say.

Increasingly, people seem to be using the Web as their primary source of information, in contrast to just a few years ago when phone calls and e-mails seemed more in demand, said Jackie Denk, a spokeswoman for an Arizona-based firefighting team and the Kaibab National Forest.

She believes people aren't hesitating to cruise the Web for updates on their own, and points to higher-than-normal traffic so far this year to her team's Web site - www.nazteam.com - as proof.

Traffic on the Forest Service's experimental, interagency site also has been high, given that only select fires have been posted so far, said Jon Holden, the agency's California-based specialist who developed www.inciweb.org.

The site, touted as a possible one-stop source for national fire news in the future, had about 120,000 visits in June, and about 219,000 in July as of July 26, he said. Some of the entries have been updated more regularly than others.

Holden said the site, tested the past few years in California, was borne largely of his frustration with a lack of a centralized, standard reporting site for fires. He said he also was embarrassed by "abandoned" incident sites he found online, frozen in time.

The goal, he said, was to develop a user-friendly site that could handle photos and maps and wouldn't require the expertise of a webmaster.

On some fires, high-speed Internet access, even dial-up, is a luxury; on others, a long distance phone line or cell phone coverage is.

"When the computers work, it's great. When they don't, it's a struggle," said Pat Cross, a spokesman for a fire management team recently assigned to a 92,000-acre blaze northeast of Billings.

For Terina Mullen, the flow of information from a large fire burning in ruggedly rural eastern Montana often depended on how long it took her to get to town - some 30 miles from camp - or to a hill within reach of a cell phone tower.

When fire threatened subdivisions near Columbus, Mont., this summer, it wasn't the news online that brought some comfort to two homeowners living out of state. It was the community they found through the World Wide Web after sharing their situations in the comments section of The Billings Gazette's online edition.

Barbara Beach, who was in California when the Saunders fire started, said she received dozens of e-mails from people similarly looking for answers or willing to share information.

"We almost became like a little chain," she said, adding: "The intimacy, the friendliness of people, we joined together as a community."