California Live Fire Maps | Hacker News Reader

California Live Fire Maps

ucanr.edu

63 pointsanigbrowl37 comments

CalTopo (my favorite mapping software, and originally made for search/rescue/fire [1]) map with overlays: https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=38.59058,-122.75299&z=11&b=m...

[1] https://caltopo.blogspot.com/2011/12/launching-caltopocom.ht...

Beautiful GIS system.

Excellent maps, thanks for sharing, commenting so I can find this again.

Many browsers also come with bookmarks.

> commenting so I can find this again.

If you upvote the GP's coment, you can find it that way too. If you go to your account page (by clicking your username in the upper right on the page), there's be links that say "upvoted submissions / comments", which will provide the full list of what you've voted on previously.

Umm... it shows no fires at all. (Edit: tried in both Chrome and Firefox.)

In fact the Kincade fire is actively burning and only a few percent contained while 180,000 residents of Sonoma County have been ordered to evacuate.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/10/26/kincade-fire-authorit...

It's you. I'm using stock Chrome and it works fine, but it takes a minute or two to load as you zoom in.

Huh. Not denying you, but after seven minutes I see no data, just the base map.

Also not getting any fires - just a map of CA afaict

Same here. Had to zoom for it to appear.

FYI, I also saw nothing at all, and no indication that anything was still loading, then eventually it loaded.

I got a loading spinner, and then an empty map of CA, and then the data loaded in, in distinct stages. If loading had gotten stuck at the second stage and I didn’t know better, I would have thought that there happen to be no fires at the moment.

Normally, I’d just shrug and move on, but in this case the misunderstanding could put people in actual danger. Until the real-time data gets loaded, this should be in some sort of obviously nonfunctional state.

No fires for me either in Firefox and Chrome on both MacOS and Linux (left the page several minutes).

Nor the Vallejo fire

Give it a minute to load. Consider it a throwback to the dial-up era.

Here's one from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CalFire) that, you know, actually shows the fires, without a significant delay. (At least, it showed right up for me, unlike the one linked to the headline here.)

https://fire.ca.gov/imapdata/index.html

This should be linked. Much better than the currently linked site.

The linked site has a lot more data than the CalFire site. CalFire just shows a single marker for each fire -- and not even for all the fires currently burning.

Let me also recommend Jeremy Ashkenas’s notebooks,

https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/california-fires (from last year)

https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/california-smoke-forecas...

Thanks for linking!

For a longer example of how the notebooks can display fire perimeters as they grow over time, here's a direct link to the Camp Fire that burned Paradise last year:

https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/california-fires?year=20...

I've had better luck with this map: https://tinyurl.com/sonomacountymap . Found via the Sonoma/Napa CalFire twitter account: https://twitter.com/CALFIRELNU .

"The high severity and acreage fires commonly seen today are driven by more extreme weather and build-up of fuel from our ongoing fire suppression activities."

If you watch this video https://youtu.be/nb2m8KKuwxk , the bright light goes out, and then we immediately see a big arc and explosion to the left. It looks like an electric problem. It turned out that the light was above a geothermal power station, plugged to PG&E grid. Even PG&E itself admitted that they were the cause of the latest Kincade fire, too, besides the fires that burned Paradise and part of Santa Rosa.

This is a better map of the Kincade Fire (Northern California wine country) that is updated multiple times a day using satellite imaging to determine hot spots. The red triangles are hot spots:

https://mappingsupport.com/p2/gissurfer.php?center=38.597554...

I've found the maps based on satellite data to be the most informative as they show you where the fire is actively burning and not just the permimeter. Here's a good one for California:

https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/afm/data/activefiremaps/cgb2019300_1...

Hoping for the best and sending best wishes for all those affected!

The title says “live” but the page itself says “updated at most twice daily”.

The page's title itself says "real-time".

What if you released a live fire map app for the world, and hong kong protesters started using it to communicate to others where police are located (fire inside city = police).

While other hong kong people also used it to point out where actual fires are located.

Imagine the political shitstorm when Apple tries to ban that app!

Are there any studies to see what percentage of these are intentionally started, if any?

> updated up to twice daily

Far from ‘live’

n.b. as of 1600 hrs 27 Oct 2019, the fire should be visible as a large area between Geyserville and Middletown, with a much larger evacuation area from there West to the coast at Bodega Bay.

So unusable for those of us without power and spotty LTE coverage.

I wish something similar was available for floods.

there's a fire in milpitas right now, doesn't show up

Edit: Fire is bad. That's all.

The trees are going to eventually burn one way or another. If nothing else lightning will do it.

A good step would be to cut down and destroy every eucalyptus tree in CA and make it illegal to harbor the species. It is an invasive species from Australia and should not exist in North America. It has shredding bark which ignites, breaks loose, and flaming embers are carried long distances spreading the fire more quickly than native species.

Flammable roof types should also be banned, when embers land on a roof the last thing it should start is a fire!

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