County Wildfire Incident Dashboard

Citizens and community leaders alike struggle to find timely, relevant and validated data during times of crisis. Despite the best efforts of agencies to coordinate communications to meet this need, there is a dizzying array of information coming from a wide variety of sources on different timelines each day during a wildfire incident. During the Thomas Fire we had direct experience with these challenges and in response developed an ad hoc system to share content and links to information sources with community members on a daily basis. Email was a poor channel for this work and distribution was limited. The LegacyWorks team, with seed funding from a community resilience grant from a local corporation, has begun developing a prototype of a wildfire incident dashboard for the expanding community data dashboard, the go-to site for up to date information on the COVID crisis. The prototype is intended to demonstrate the potential for this kind of tool and to catalyze a broad public-private partnership to develop a fully realized version of it with the critical public safety agencies that steward a wide array of important information before, during and after wildfire incidents.

While the project is framed here as a critical need for wildfire incidents, the same need holds true for all incident types including earthquakes, floods, hazardous material spills, transportation system disruptions and more. The wildfire incident dashboard is being designed with expansion to all incidents in mind.

Status: Conceptual (Prototype created and shared with Fire Chief's Association and it is under consideration)

Cost: Medium

Partners: Santa Barbara County Fire Department, LegacyWorks Group

Permitting: None required

Funding Sources: A small seed grant from a local corporation is funding the development of a prototype and initial engagement efforts by the LegacyWorks team. Further development funding is being sought from local agencies and philanthropic funders