[Talk-us] What should we do for wildfires?

[Russell Deffner]

Yes Val,

Maybe I sounded a bit too discouraging in my first reply, so in my opinion there's really only two things we need to do to get OSM used in US disaster response:
1. Keep mapping and doing all the things we do to continually improve OSM; the more 'complete'/up-to-date the map is before the incident, the more useful it will be.
2. Keep up outreach - both to agencies and individuals...

Getting general awareness to individual firefighters/responders is easier and may be more successful; however, myself and a few others from HOT recently worked with folks from FEMA to generate data in OSM for the Mariana Islands; as there wasn't really any public source. And HOT helped support Hurricane Sandy, but not exactly/directly via the typical OSM mapping projects. So we have made some progress and of course there's lots of folks in local, state and federal government on this list who are working on this stuff. Specific to this fire, or any incident, if we do want to set-up a mapping project; I can help there.

=Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: Valerie Anderson [mailto:valerie at andersongeospatial.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2016 9:37 AM
To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] What should we do for wildfires?

Hey all,

I'm a current wildland firefighter but all I do are prescribed fires
here in Florida. In terms of getting ICs using OSM your best bet would
be to get they guys who do fire every week to start using and
contributing to OSM. They're usually the ones tapped for local and
remote wildfires. They also have a ton of data for firelines, land
cover, escape routes, and wetlands. I think you probably won't be able
to get anyone to use OSM for incidents in the US until it's a lot
better, but a better first step would be to get local governments to
quit using their own data/proprietary programs to manage their roads,
streetlights, and routing emergency vehicles and get a few to switch to
OSM. That would make an IC much more likely to rely on OSM for a future
wildfire, particularly if a local burn boss was already familiar with
it.

Cheers,

Val