During California’s long fire season, Fire Twitter ignites, but few accounts have helped residents as much as CAFireScanner - even if the operator has never left New Zealand. (From 2021)
rural landscapes. When flames threaten, residents of fire country have to make the colossal decision of whether—and when—to abandon their homes. State and local agencies can seem excruciatingly slow to provide updates. If the woods can seem lonely on a good day, on a fire day the silence breeds pure fear.
During California’s long fire season—roughly May through October—Michael sits at his desk all day, sometimes for 18-hour stretches, keeping watch over that single state’s blazes. On his desk sit four phones: one personal device and three devoted to running PulsePoint, an app that monitors the radio channels first responders use. When emergency workers respond to a distress call, the app sends him a notification.
. Michael moved closer to the scanner, rapt. Soon, it escalated to a three-alarm fire. Operators called for more units, his father’s among them. Michael sat and listened as the flames consumed everything inside the building and belched great black plumes of smoke into the sky. By the morning, the furniture store was gone.
More and more, the calls that drew him in came from California. Other disasters were one-offs, but California wildfires had a regularity to them, and their intensity was unmatched. On September 12, 2015, he happened to be listening when a fire in California’s Lake County ballooned into a 50,000-acre blaze. The Valley Fire, as it came to be called, destroyed several small towns and killed four people.
Because California and New Zealand are 19 hours apart during most of fire season—meaning Michael’s clock is set to five hours earlier, but on the next day—he can cover California fires during their peak spread times. Fires usually pick up in the afternoon, when winds are the strongest, and into the night, when most locals are asleep. When a fire burns somewhere in the state, he’ll tweet dozens of times per day. He gained followers slowly at first, just a trickle of people, then en masse.
Michael uses the app Pulse Point running on multiple phones to monitor more than 100 scanner feeds from California emergency response agencies.Michael became even more invested in learning the dynamics of California’s blazes. He read detailed weather forecasts and studied topography maps to try to predict which areas of the state were especially prone to fires. He memorized the agency codes, the lingo, the criss-crossing complexity of California’s many emergency agencies.
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