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Friday, July 11, 2008

InciWeb is working--for now

InciWeb, when it is working, is great. Theoretically, it is One Place where you can go to get information about going fires. It is easy to upload data to the site, and it can take some of the workload off agencies if they don't have to maintain their own fire-specific web sites.

But when there are many fires burning, or there are one or two that generate a lot of interest, the web site can't handle the load and chokes, not working at all. When the need for it is the greatest, it is most likely to fail.

After being out of service off and on for several days, it started working recently. Not all of the fires have started using it again, since they have not been able to upload their information to the site on a consistent basis for days. But not all fires use InciWeb even when it works, for example, the BTU (or Butte County) complex does not use it.

There are several ways you can sort the data. Here is an example of fires in California in descending order by size.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

InciWeb was moved to a new location with new servers about two weeks ago. The recent outages are not the traffic related issues of the past but rather the result of some system-related issues with the new environment. From what I hear the recent system errors were affecting multiple fire applications on the same network and the system was taken off line for repairs. It sounds like they fixed the problems and InciWeb should remain online.

Also, the last outage was actually less than 2 days - Down at 4pm PT on Wednesday and back up this morning. I only know because I was updating an incident when it went down.

Bill said...

Thanks for the information. It's a great resource when it works... maybe it will be more consistent now.

Scott said...

And a couple weeks after the post, it's down again. I sure wish it was up since the Cody, WY area has its first wildland fire for the season...

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