Building a Resource for Fire Information

By Richard Martin, 8-11-06

	Caption: Who said this fire was contained?

When Jon Holden, then a public affairs officer with the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California, managed the information flow on the 2002 Biscuit Fire, on the California-Oregon border, he discovered a mess.

"That was my first fire," recalls Holden, "and I was amazed at how complicated and confusing the process was to get information out to the public. The content was static in nature, and to publish incident changes online, there were 30 pages you had to upload and change."

Many Forest Service clock-punchers would have sighed at the lamentable state of things and done nothing. Holden, a more proactive sort, decided to do something: he began building the online Web site and application that is now InciWeb, the central clearinghouse for information on just about every current fire in the United States (plus American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands).

InciWeb -- the fire Incident Web information system -- is the rare interagency project that works efficiently and cost-effectively, a fact due largely to Holden's gift for managing information and the proselytizing of a few key fire officials, particularly Rose Davis, the NFS public affairs specialist at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. When Holden went looking for a supporter to take InciWeb from the regional, California level to the national level, Davis became the project's champion.

"I stepped up to provide some leadership, because I knew we needed one place to go for information, that was not sophisticated as far as posting updates went," explains Davis. "I started investigating, talking to Jon, talking to the users, and I sent it out to colleagues in the field, including a couple I knew would go kicking and screaming into the night before they'd maintain a website."

As of this morning, InciWeb includes up-to-date information 96 fires or "incidents," including 50 actives ones. The information -- including acreage, assigned agencies, maps, road closures, incident commanders, contact phone numbers, and percent contained -- is posted either by firefighting team managers or by public affairs officers at the "unit" (i.e., National Forest, Park, BLM District etc.), and is available for the public the media, and so on. The most recent update at the moment is on the Purdy Fire in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming -- and it was posted about five minutes before the writing of the paragraph.

Holden, now a technology project specialist at the regional NFS office in McClellan, California, says InciWeb gets about 18,000 visitors a day. If increased access to accurate, updated information helps save lives and property, the InciWeb site is responsible for a lot of safe homes and people in the last few years.

"The main payoff is having all this information in a single location where everyone in the affected communities can find it," says Holden. "And it's timely, consistent, and up to date. Before there were hundreds of spots and which one had the most accurate information at any time pretty much depended on which way the wind was blowing."

InciWeb this year is in a pilot program before being made the official site for all interagency fire information as early as next year. The challenge at the moment, says Davis is "weaning" individual agencies or park offices from fire-information sites they've created for their own units.
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