Wildfire victims created own network

By Ron Harris
Associated Press

Joe Urbas-zewski used laptops to create and update a Web log on the wildfires, with people in the fire zones contributing. Associated Press

Communities scattered by the firestorms regrouped virtually, staying in touch and informed through Web bulletin boards and logs, e-mail and streaming audio of police and fire radio transmissions.

Some residents even turned themselves into reporters and set out for the fire lines, where they pressed authorities for details that they posted online along with photos of the destruction.

For communities in the scorched San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, the Web site rimoftheworld.net became a lifeline, a running commentary and record of the fires that killed 22 people and destroyed 3,600 homes before cooler, wetter weather arrived.

"It gave the village a set of drums to get the message out," said Gary Stebbings, a construction manager who monitored the Web site regularly after evacuating his home in the alpine town of Lake Arrowhead.

Wired residents have been forming jury-rigged digital hamlets for at least a decade. But this was a new twist — "the ultimate democratization of the media," said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution."

"The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access," said Rheingold.

Scott Straley launched rimoftheworld.net some weeks before the fires as a small community hub for information, hardly imagining it would draw a half-million page views in a single day — in its peak day, it attracted 25,000 unique visitors.

The site's inbox was brimming with e-mails asking "Did you hear from so-and-so? Do you know where so-and-so is?" said Straley, who worked 12-hour days on the site after evacuating his home in nearby Cedarpines Park.

Straley also received and posted digital photos of both damaged and unscathed homes.

An electronic bulletin board at rimoftheworld.net kept Straley busy as he posted, in response to queries, information from people with firsthand knowledge of the fate of individual homes.

Some bulletin-board exchanges were brief:

"Has anyone heard if Kuffel Canyon burned?" one person early last week.

"Drove up Kuffel Canyon yesterday to (Highway) 18 and it was all fine," came the reply.

Stebbings, who waited out the blazes with his wife and five children in a hotel, hooking up to the Internet with a laptop, also kept up with round-the-clock emergency scanner traffic carried by an AM-quality channel on live365.com, an Internet radio site. (Their home survived, as did Straley's).

Other evacuees had other reasons to be online.

Rand and Karen Ledbetter's home escaped the flames, but their detached home office didn't and their home phones didn't work.

So they were at a San Bernardino Kinko's copy store as the fires were brought under control, their livelihood barely interrupted thanks to the Internet. Logged onto a PC workstation, they were getting a Web site up so they could continue their product distribution business.

"We can maintain our business level," Ledbetter said. "It's a gas."

A short drive away, at a rented room at a tennis club in Redlands, evacuee Joe Urbaszewski, who teaches television and video production at Rim of the World High School, worked away on his Apple PowerBook G4.

He and his wife have kept an extensive Web log, or blog, detailing the fire's wrath in photos and words, with help from contributors on the mountain, Urbaszewski said.

"I wanted to help. I'm not a firefighter.," he said. "What do I do? It's technology. It touches my heart that I can finally give something like that."