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Where to get good information on wildland fires in Oregon
Here are some helpful websites that will get you up to date accurate information on wildland fires in Oregon, including maps, acreage and more.
Photo by Brett Cole
The obvious Google search will turn up plenty of news stories on fires, but often times what they're reporting on isn't the most up to date information. And it sure can be difficult to find a map of where fires are actually burning. Here are a few links and tips on where to get good up to date information on wildland fires.
Incident Information System (INCIWEB) http://www.inciweb.org/
This is a great national site that has a significant amount of information that is very up to date on all fires. Despite it being a national site, it's very easy to find the fire you're interested in. In the upper right of the web site is a drop down menu for all fires in the country, or you can sort them by state. Click on the fire you're interested in and you'll see reports on fire behavior, closure info, and acreage etc. This site has an embedded Google map showing the fire perimeter. If you're really interested you can even download previous days' fire perimeters (KML file). Also, easy to miss, but near the top of the fire page is a link to other maps which can include a variety of different fire maps. May or may not have closure area maps. This site is updated at least daily.
Northwest Interagency Coordination Center http://www.nwccweb.us/index.aspxWhile
this site is a bit less user friendly than the INCIWEB site, it does
give you more mapping options. Particularly if you follow their links to
their GIS and FTP site. I find this rather handy as
when you click on the FTP site (accessible through a normal browser) you
can download the most recent fire perimeters for all active fires in
the Northwest in one Google Earth file (rather than one at a time). This
site also allows you to download GIS data for the fire perimeters which
for the tech savvy folks can be very handy.
When looking for information on fires I'd suggest keeping one thing
in mind, whether you're reading a fire report or a news story on a fire,
there will always be a lot of hype...particularly in the news stories.
The media will sometimes make a big deal out of a fire that's only 100
acres in size...which could become serious, but relatively speaking by
Oregon fire standards that's a very small fire. When the fires start to
grow by thousands of acres per day, that's when they are earning the
hype - that or if they are burning near a community. Here's a quote from a story that is an exception to this rule:
“Even though it’s putting up a lot of smoke, a lot of times it’s just burning the lichen out of the trees,” said Steve Gage, the incident commander.
Where do you look for recent information on wildland fires?
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