Not sure where to quickly find out if a wildfire is headed your way and might force you to evacuate your home?
Tap an app button on your phone, or open a web browser. There’s a tremendous amount of wildfire information online, and some key tools have recently gotten better and easier to use.
And now is the time to get up to speed. Fire season is off to an early start, triggered by inland heat waves like the one that started in San Diego County on Friday. Five wildfires broke out in June and July, and at least two of them led to evacuations.
The risk of wildfires will remain high across inland areas throughout August and will become an issue from the desert to the sea in September, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
It’s unclear what will happen when the Santa Ana winds begin blowing in late September or early October. But the county could experience a fiery downside of Hilary, a rare and unexpected tropical storm that drenched Southern California last August.
Hilary’s rains and the previous wet winter helped suppress wildfires last fall. But this also led to the explosive growth of vegetation that’s now drying out, providing huge amounts of fuel for wildfires, forecasters say.
The good news is that the public can now more easily see images of wildfires as they erupt and spread due to the wider use of AlertCalifornia, a statewide network of live fire and weather cameras operated by UC San Diego.
The cameras helped firefighters spot and fight the Grove fire near Palomar Mountain on July 24 and the nearby Nixon fire around the Riverside County line on July 29.
The fires erupted about the time UCSD’s camera network was being added to Watch Duty, an easy-to-use wildfire app and web site run by a nonprofit based in Sonoma County.
The system’s photos are combined with the latest news about specific fires, including evacuation notices. And there’s animation of the paths that aircraft are taking as they help fight such blazes. Dozens of employees are responsible for keeping the site current, including five news reporters, says John Mills, who co-founded Watch Duty three years ago.
The site’s basic features are offered without charge to the public. They’re already widely used by first responders, forecasters and utility companies, including San Diego Gas & Electric, which monitors the threats posed to power grid by fire and wind.
“A lot of times the information provided (by fire experts) is corroborated by what they are seeing on Watch Duty,” said Chris Arends, who coordinates SDG&E’s meteorological program.
Watch Duty followed the lead of Cal Fire, which added AlertCalifornia to its digital offerings in February. The agency is responsible for fighting wildfires throughout California, where about 770,000 acres have burned so far this year. The figure for all of 2023 was 26,000.
Cal Fire currently doesn’t have an easily able and up-to-date app for wildfires. But it has placed UCSD’s camera images in a prominent spot on its website. And it has the capacity to distribute them more broadly, having mastered the art of placing them on social media platforms.
But Cal Fire, Watch Duty and other outlets suffer from a significant problem not of their own making.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has sole responsibility for issuing wildfire evacuation notices, and many consumers have complained that alerts are written in jargon and can be hard to understand, especially in a stressful situation like a wildfire.
In particular, the evacuation maps tweeted out during the Grove fire drew criticism for the lack of clarity. The problem, a county spokesperson said, was that the maps were zoomed too far in, showing no roads or landmarks to indicate what part of the sparsely-populated area was targeted for evacuation. Officials were made aware of the problem, and adjustments will be made, he said.
Consumers have to deal with another significant problem: There are lots of useful and potentially life-saving wildfire tools spread across many apps and websites — but the best offerings have yet to be pulled together in one place.
Watch Duty may evolve into a one-stop shopping site for such data. But that won’t happen this fire season.
Until that’s done, consumers should also know about two other sites.
SDGE Weather, which is available as an app and on a website, weather.sdgeweather.com, features a fire potential index that estimates the likelihood of wildfires breaking out across its service area over a seven-day period. The tool also estimates how fast the winds will blow and how hot the weather will become — a feature that can be especially useful for spotting the onset of Santa Ana winds.
There’s also the National Weather Service in San Diego. The recent Grove fire was sparked by lightning — a common cause of wildfire this time of year. Forecasters follow such systems very closely, and rapidly post notices that say where the parent thunderstorm is located and where the system might going. Their advisories typically include maps that help consumers see where a thunderstorm is in relation to their home.
Forecasters also issue special alerts — something that happened Thursday when more than 1,200 lightning bolts were recorded flashing in the sky across East County.
Staff writer Teri Figueroa contributed to this report.
