Fire Culture - Maryland Firefighters Deployed to California
("In order to deal with the upsurge in ecological, economic, educational, legal and health issues associated with more and bigger wildfires in the West, Dr. Schoennagel proclaims, 'We need to develop a new fire culture.'" - Sara Vowell, NYTimes.com June 13 2018) Here's an item from one story deserving of expansion into a larger feature story of its own: From one of multiple thoroughly reported stories on the Carr Fire in today's "edition" of the San Francisco Chronicle (July 29, 2018 page A11 headline "Fires merge, forcing evacuations") (online version of same story here, with different headline "Mendocino fires combine, moving into Lake County and forcing evacuations"):
But catch journalists doing something right - get a look at this infographic from the print edition's cover story with headline "Woman, 2 kids die in Redding blaze", continued on page A18 (a story whose exact equivalent content and infographic is not available in the up-to-the-minute online version):
This infographic shows the reader where the fire started on Monday July 23 2018, in a yellow outline shows where the fire had spread to just after midnight Friday July 27, and in red outline where the fire had spread beyond that by evening Saturday July 28.
(Newspaper software improvement opportunity? A problem solveable with model-view-controller design pattern?) As a print reader, I can report this infographic was difficult to find on the website and then share online - as software evolves we could make it easier to hunt-and-find online what we serendipitously discovered in print. Or not. I'd just hate to see more papers go the way of the recently staff-slashed-in-half NY Daily News.)
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
"One of the problems that firefighters are facing right now is just lack of resources," said Brian May, spokesperson for the state's Office of Emergency Services. "With all of these fires burning across the state, they are just tapped out."These fires have been burning longer faster and further past the bounds of the summer season for several years now. Here and there I hear of a friend mentioning a family member firefighter "flying all over the country" for work "to feed our family." Hope an enterprising journalist can pick up on this and cover life of a cross-country firefighter in this warming age. Put a face on the story.
Firefighters, trucks, and other resources were pouring into California from states as far away as Maryland, with more than 400 local government fire engines responding, he added. Rising temperatures have made conditions for firefighting particularly challenging.
But catch journalists doing something right - get a look at this infographic from the print edition's cover story with headline "Woman, 2 kids die in Redding blaze", continued on page A18 (a story whose exact equivalent content and infographic is not available in the up-to-the-minute online version):
This infographic shows the reader where the fire started on Monday July 23 2018, in a yellow outline shows where the fire had spread to just after midnight Friday July 27, and in red outline where the fire had spread beyond that by evening Saturday July 28.
(Newspaper software improvement opportunity? A problem solveable with model-view-controller design pattern?) As a print reader, I can report this infographic was difficult to find on the website and then share online - as software evolves we could make it easier to hunt-and-find online what we serendipitously discovered in print. Or not. I'd just hate to see more papers go the way of the recently staff-slashed-in-half NY Daily News.)
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
