Hi all -
Perhaps on your local news, you've seen ten seconds of flames roaring through 110,000 acres of national forest and protected wilderness here in Southern California. Well, there are people in the way of the fire, and they need their news, NOW!
Ojai is a great little town of 8,000 folks, fourteen miles east of Ventura, CA, tucked into a valley. We are seriously threatened by the fire, as it is expected that the hot easterly Santa Ana winds will kick up and send the fire roaring southwest towards us. Holy crap.
What this natural disaster has shown is that the methods of communication have been largely inadequate. Information has not been disseminated well by local media and there is no central point of communication (although Inciweb.com has been doing a great job).
Enter local community blog The Ojai Post. We have built the most comprehensive Day Fire Resource Page on the web, and we have the most updated information anywhere, consolidated from dozens of sources.
After a mention at our big community meeting Thursday night, and some new links from official sites and bloggers alike, traffic has shot up from a couple hundred visitors a day to over 3,000 yesterday.
What I am finding so empowering about the experience is how a community blog can be fluffy, fun and entertaining 95% of the time, and then swing into hardcore disaster management and centralized information mode. We are mobilizing for the fight, as surely as the sixty three agencies that are on the job (its a hell of a lot less dangerous where I'm sitting though).
So I guess this boils down to a shameless plug - if you know anyone that needs info on the Day Fire, send 'em to The Ojai Post.