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.
