M00se0nTheLoose

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iliana
@iliana

there is a massive wildfire in southern washington state, the newell road fire. i found the above text on the klickitat county department of emergency management web page.

i have been idly thinking about the loss of official government communication associated with twitter's spiraling the drain, so this has already been on my mind. but that i feel is nothing compared to a county emergency management official typing up these instructions so that people potentially in the path of danger can determine whether they should be preparing for, ready to, or required to evacuate.

i was talking with my aunt while she and i were both at my parents' last weekend; she used to be a communications manager at a capitol city in the midwestern US. her municipality had a pandemic emergency preparedness plan, and the plan included a communications component, which she was a part of continued changes of before COVID happened. the plan did not, and probably could not have, taken into account the threat that there would be so much loud mistrust of medical professionals and public health officials. the plan did not take into account that a populist POTUS would personally attack medical professionals and public health officials.

likewise, i imagine the various emergency management authorities around the country did not take into account the threat that the world's dumbest billionaire would complete a hostile takeover of one of their primary public communication platforms.

this, though. i don't know if i have the words for this. it is one of those "as technologists we have utterly fucked up" sorts of moments if a county emergency management department — no matter their resources — cannot figure out how to communicate a detailed wildfire evacuation map to the public without requiring the public have an account with any of the four largest tech companies (and also yahoo) and accept a terms of service and privacy policy they do not have the time to read or the patience to accept.

(edit: to clarify, the klickitat EM web page does have a less detailed version of the evacuation map, so it's not like there's no map at all if you don't have a login. note that this link IS NOT A CURRENT VERSION OF THE MAP, see the official page if you need it.)

the government has put so much into IPAWS, but because this system can only transmit brief text messages (a good thing, i think), many messages point users to online services for further information. where departments have the resources, city websites and other self-hosted infrastructure is used. in less-populated areas, they're told to check facebook. perhaps it's time for FEMA to think about the other half of communication: how agencies can provide additional emergency management resources like evacuation maps to the public without resorting to this.


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in reply to @iliana's post:

I was curious how we got here, and it looks like this private company sells their mapping tools to, among many other customers, first responders and incident managers: https://training.caltopo.com/firstresponse/course
Presumably, the next step was "our data is already in this centralized tool, and individuals also sometimes use a free version of this tool, so this is a super easy way for us to publish our data to 'everybody'."
It doesn't end there, either - most of the text on the page you linked is hidden in images with less-than-useful alt text. It really does seem like they're allocating almost no budget or focus to effectively communicating through their website

maybe, but also i went to caltopo dot com and accidentallied my way into seeing a highly detailed map of both the current state of the newell road fire and how close it is to public lands, without making an account. https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=45.83932,-120.34973&z=10&b=mbt&a=sma%2Cfire%2Cmodis_mp

it kind of feels like somebody forgot to do something plainly sensible here. not sure if it's klickitat EM or caltopo but either way caltopo could fix it for good

To add insult to injury, the image with the QR code isn't even a link on my end? I had to scan the QR code because manually typing out that link was going to be a nightmare.

it is one of those "as technologists we have utterly fucked up" sorts of moments

Mentally picturing the typical project development team, I'll be devil's advocate here and claim that requiring-an-account-to-see-evacuation-maps might also have been suggested and pushed through by whoever was the county department (=customer) representative on the project team.
So freaking often as a software developer when I get requirements from BA/customer-representatives it feels like I am the first person to actually turn on my brain and say "ok, let's imagine what it will look like for a user if we actually build and run this the way you suggested" or "has anyone in this project's chain of communication thought about what situations your users might find themselves in and what solutions might serve them best".
Like sure, "technologists" and their organisations are often incredible doofuses with terrible processes but a failure of this caliber is nearly always a compound failure (edit: from my non-US perspective, don't know about the brainworm mechanisms in your government-IT-done-by-private-corps)
Have a positive counter example, i.e. a similar situation where this was done right: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/