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

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

I see good questions and good suggestions about wildfires and want to toss in my two cents and a possible consultation connection.

Last first:  I know an OSM volunteer who is also a firefighter who I know worked very hard to get all roads and buildings in San Luis Obispo County, California into OSM cleanly and nicely.  It wasn't just him, I understand it was a joint effort of the local firefighting organization he is a member of (I don't know if that is local or state, known as CalFire) and it took as long as a couple of years, circa 2012-3.  They got all the TIGER tags cleaned up while they were at it, too!  (Please see http://product.itoworld.com/map/162?lon=-120.441&lat=35.452&zoom=10&fullscreen=true and look at all that beautiful BLUE!)  His name is Joe Larson and he can be contacted with http://www.openstreetmap.org/message/new/j03lar50n.  If you were to missive him and ask how doing this in OSM has helped/does help their firefighting efforts, I believe he would be glad to share with you benefits of that knowledge.

Joe might have conveyed to me that one important reason for his organization to expend so much OSM effort was so that it would be possible for all/any firefighters or Incident Commanders to have reasonably accurate maps, especially of structures/buildings, on a smart-phone or tablet device while in the field, and that these data could be pre-loaded, not requiring Wi-Fi or cellular access in this extremely remote, rugged and poor-cell-phone-coverage area.  Looking at mapnik, I'd say "Mission Accomplished!"

Next, I want to echo that I believe firefighting organizations can use OSM data in this way, and may very well want to consider doing so, but only after serious comparison with the methodologies they now use for mapping (of course).  It does seem to be part of a "smart future" for fire organizations' data planning.  I have spoken with my local CalFire Captain/Chief about the mapping products that they use during fires and whether it is possible to merge these with OSM, potentially improving both datasets.  His perspicacious answer was roughly that many highly rural fire roads were provided to CalFire by private property owners with the understanding that these data are proprietary and therefore entering them into OSM would violate ODBL.  I haven't completely given up on CalFire being an OSM data source (and vice versa), but this is a tough nut to crack, unless a clean split can be made between CalFire's proprietary- and non-proprietary data.

Finally, I believe that a (potentially "time-sensitive") rendering for a polygon tag like burn_area=[blackened, charred_trees, charcoal_debris_field...] which can be applied to an area after a major fire is quite useful.  By time-sensitive I mean that the renderer might try to be clever by aging the rendering so that as nature recovers the area, the tag is increasingly ignored (and "fades" the result), although more ideal might be for better tagging to be applied as time goes on -- this includes changing the area of the polygon so it remains accurate.  Especially in public areas like state parks or national forests, this can really help a map consumer choose whether to avoid (or even visit) a burned area for recreational purposes, something I know I would use OSM for if it were able to do so.

Regards,
SteveA
California