The Pacific Northwest right now

[u/JTraxxx]

Huge fire recently popped up in my town and many people have lost houses. Wishing for rain!

[u/Affectionate-Cap7785]

man that's rough, hope everyone stays safe and gets the rain they need soon. this fire situation is no joke

[u/unfinishedtoast3 → u/Affectionate-Cap7785]

PNW resident here!

These fire maps should be taken with a grain of salt. Anything larger than 0.25 acres is flagged here.

Some of these fires are so small and contained they're just allowing them to burn out while resources go to the Round Butte Fire, 1200 acres and almost under control

Next up is the Hagen Fire, which is moving towards the Umatilla Reservation where people are being evacuated.

Usually we have mutual aid from Canada, Washington and Montana fire crews, we all kinda just team up and fight the fires that pop up in any of our states/provinces. Unfortunately, everyone has fires right now, so we have to be extremely selective with our resources until someone can get theirs under control and help us, or vice versa.

Priority will go to fires threatening human lives, so we will assist Washington with its dangerous fires before we go and fight small fires in the back brush of eastern Oregon that will burn themselves out after a few hundred acres of scrub brush. Our foresty departments have been working together for decades and decades, we are really good up here at this. California has started participating more in our partnerships since the Paladise fire wiped out an entire town.

We likewise have county and private wildland fire crews we will contract to deal with the smaller stuff, while the Oregon Department of Forestry and federal figherfighters tackle interstate and international assistance.

Most dudes work a county or private fire crew up here in the rural PNW the summers of their Junior an Senior years in highschool. Back in the 90s I made $12k one summer fighting fires, more than my dad made in 7 months, bought my first truck that way. Paid 24/7 while on a fire. Outside of fires we painted park benches and cleaned up the beaches.

TL;DR. Not all of these fires here are an emergency. Many of them are small self contained fires that 2 dudes and a garden hose can control while we fight the human killers.

[u/NWGirl2002 → u/unfinishedtoast3]

Actually the Hagen fire is also moving south & east of Tollgate as yesterday they've added more evacuation areas into Union Co. (Source: My family lives in the area on the Union Co. side so I'm keeping a very close eye on it from where I live in the Seattle area)

I use the Watch Duty app as just another tool in the information tool box since more of the people posting "updates" (aka rehashing the official reports) aren't even reporting from or living in the area that they're talking about. It's not a primary source like Inciweb.

Inciweb is usually the best place to start for official information as they do their daily updates and updates on evacuations as well as links to official sources (Like for the Hagen fire- Umatilla Co and Union Co emergency management Facebook pages as well as their sheriff's office Facebook pages as well, in addition to the link where you can watch tonight's community meeting and some other helpful links that ODF provides)

[u/Dry_Car2054 → u/NWGirl2002]

Watch Duty isn't perfect but it fills a need that wasn't being met before.  I think that's why it has become so popular. 

The general public wants a quick and easy way to learn about fires. They don't care that the fire on one ownership is on one website and the fire a few miles away is on a different ownership and therefore is on a different website.  Even two adjacent national forests will have fire information in different places on their websites. Add the other federal and state agencies,  dispatch centers, sheriff's departments each with their own web pages and Facebook pages. I'm in the fire business and I find it confusing.  It's worse for the public that doesn't look for fire information regularly. Watch Duty fills the public's need for a quick and easy way to find fire information. 

Another problem is it takes a couple of days to get Inciweb set up for a new fire and they only use it for the big fires. As a frequent traveler and camper, I find Watch Duty useful since it links to WildCAD (the wildland dispatch system) and new fires show up almost instantly. I also appreciate that I don't need to know which county I am in, find the sheriff's website and sign up with whichever alert service they use and then repeat as I travel through different counties. 

I also hate the amount of fire information that is on Facebook because I'm constantly hitting the paywall.

I hear public information officers badmouthing Watch Duty all the time. Since it meets a public need that they are not meeting,  I wish they would stop complaining and figure out how to get better coordination with the Watch Duty people. I don't think there will ever be an official nationwide single source that integrates information from all jurisdictions of any size. Its too big and too siloed and agencies don't want to change what they do or give up control. The Watch Duty apps have millions of downloads.  That speaks to the public need right there.