San Diego Fires on Google My Maps

Nick, a classmate of mine, pointed out this interesting use of Google My Maps for disaster reporting by KPBS News in San Diego. KPBS is also maintaining a Twitter stream for updates about the fires, which is the most useful potential use of Twitter I think I've seen. Has anyone seen any fire mapping systems on the web that integrate discussions? Requests for missing people, perhaps requests by evacuees for ground info on their homes?

Comments

[Faith]

Cool site -- I pointed out the LA Times version of this in my comments to my own post yesterday, but this version is even better. I love it. The one thing I also noted yesterday that I think could be really interesting is that you can actually turn the traffic layer on in Google Maps, which could be useful in an evacuation situation -- real-time traffic could be a huge boon with maps this easy to make and is something that emergency folks are particularly interested in.

I know with Hurricane Katrina there was some work done on webGIS/people finding, and I did read an interesting article yesterday (in Wired) saying people who had physical answering machines were calling their houses and figuring if they got an answer, their house was still standing. The Twitter thing is getting a lot of coverage in Wired online today (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/california_fires/index.html).

A lot of interesting questions from all this...

[Ken-ichi]

Heh, I saw your comment about the LA Times site right after I posted this. Of course, I immediately checked out traffic conditions, and for the first time wondered about how up to date it was. For normal traffic conditions, I'm usually satisfied with assuming Google has data up to the hour or so, but if my family's life was on the line, I would really want to know exactly how up to date Google traffic data was. Same goes for the My Maps interface: still no good sense of how timely are the data.