The Internet is Helping Us in Natural Disasters, But Not Enough

I just published a new post on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog about what's now being called the "Summit Fire" in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Watsonville. As a kid who grew-up in tornado country, I was completely clueless about wildfires until yesterday. Now I've been studying everything available online to track the blaze because it's just a few miles from my sister's dream home, her animals, and one of the most beautiful pieces of property I've ever seen in my life. I don't know if I'm at liberty to describe it, but even if I did, still, it's one of those places where you have to see it to believe it.

In any case, what I learned over the past 24 hours is that although we have 2700 firefighters on the scene to battle these fires, we only get semi-accurate updates about once a day about where the fires really are. People are in their homes waiting for calls or knocks on the door to evacuate. The neighbors who may or may not have phones or power communicate to the best of their ability, but they're still not certain how far away it is. They see the smoke or possibly the flames, but it's difficult to discern the distance. I found one live blog site where there was some minimal conversation via locals about what was going on to help sift through the mystery, but that was it.

So what I want to know is where do we go from here? What is the future of emergency response online? It has to be better than a few news sites and links. I'm not saying what we have now isn't good. I'm happy we have the resources we do. But I know from my technology background that we can do better. We've put together phenomenal outreach programs and online activism to raise money and repair devastated areas. Why not create a place where communities can create ad-hoc emergency response sites as they arise? It's possible something like this already exists, but not enough of us know about it.

What I found was one site for firefighters that said how to listen on short range scanners, some articles on the local newspaper site, a few maps that are only updated daily, the state fire site with data updated periodically (like every day or half a day), one satellite image of the fire, brief TV and radio coverage, a state road closures page, one live blog on the local news station web site where people exchanged notes, and a totally overloaded fire detection map at noaa.gov that nobody can use because everybody's trying to get to it. And when watching the news and hearing from locals, it seems that the firefighters and police are keeping things barricaded for safety and not allowing any information transferral during the process.

Fires are dangerous, but if people can use personal weather stations and webcams like linked on the Weather Underground, why not have a system that applies locals as information centers online and includes what's coming across the waves from emergency support services? Anyone out there have an idea of how to do this?

Buying & Selling on EBay While Giving to Charity

My husband is now working on the charity-related auction program within eBay and their umbrella name is Giving Works. Giving Works allows buyers to search by items that donate parts or all of their proceeds to charity. It also allows sellers to donate a percentage of their sale proceeds to the organization(s) of their choice. "Help save an animal every time you shop" is one promotion they have, for example, but there are many. Supposedly over 10,000 nonprofits are in their system and users can add others.

Save the Environment This Week & Wildlife Next Week

I didn't intend for my blog to turn into a chronicle of non profit events, but since that's one of the things I spend the most time on, I hear about a lot of wonderful opportunities to give to organizations in need so for now, until I move philanthropic activities to another site, here's another great event:

In Palo Alto, Wildlife Rescue, Inc. is having a "Wildlife Rescue Day" at Mitchell Park at 3800 Middlefield Rd. on May 5th from 11am-4pm. They'll take cash donations, gift cards (great idea), unscented paper towels and tp, cottonballs & q-tips, wheat germ, unopened jars of baby food, liquid hand soap, plastic garbage bags and pet carriers. Check out wildliferescue.ws - they will be receiving a lot of orphans as spring gets into full gear with all of the new baby animals. Non-locals can contribute too.

Mountain Lions & Leopards & Lynxes, Oh My!

Last night, I attended an event for Leopards, Etc. that brought big cats up close to the attendees. For a small venue in Los Altos Hills, they packed in more people with cameras than are at major philanthropic events in San Francisco. This was way better than celebrity-watching, IMHO. These big cats, brought down from Occidental, CA, where they run amongst Redwoods and Oaks when not working for the organization, represent all of the threatened and endangered big cat species around the world.

The Leopards, Etc. organization provides educational programs where the big cats go out and show the world how special they are. I've never seen such gigantic paws on such gentle creatures. They also raise money for other organizations, like the Snow Leopard Conservancy that saves Snow Leopards from being stoned to death when they encroach on livestock. These other organizations funded raise awareness around the world by putting up fences and teaching locals that it is possible to live in harmony with big cats around the corner. My favorite cat at the event was a Siberian Lynx, named Oksana. Leopards, Etc. allows "adoptions" where you can adopt-a-cat from a distance, like many other animal organizations allow.

For Bay Area locals, you can see the big cats in action at Foothill College at 2pm on Sunday, March 25.

Local Pet Photo Blog

The San Jose Mercury News has this adorable pet photo blog that features pets and wildlife submitted from readers. It's filled with photos and videos mostly of cats and dogs, and allows comments as well.