BILLINGS — For Jack de Golia, the idea of issuing updates on wildfires by fax seems almost quaint. These days, the Forest Service spokesman prefers using the Web to post maps, fact sheets and anything else he thinks will help explain — as quickly and as often as possible — what a wildfire is doing and how firefighters are responding.
‘‘There's been an evolution of information, and you have to keep up,'' said de Golia, who, from assignments in Montana and Wyoming this summer, has posted frequently to a new, experimental government fire information Web site, www.inciweb.org.
‘‘There's a need for people to have ready access to information on fires,'' he added. ‘‘I think it's important, when people are very frightened or concerned, that they have as much information on an event as they need to make decisions.
Some Web sites hosted by government agencies or teams trained to manage wildfires feature important news on blazes, as well as cool photos of flames or air tankers that double as public relations tools. E-mail makes it easier for businesses in fire-affected communities to stay up-to-date. And webcam shots have provided occasional looks at fire in Yellowstone National Park.
But the rise of the Internet is also creating challenges for those who are the public faces of emergency and charged with delivering timely, accurate news, sometimes from remote locations and in environments where rumors can fly faster than hot embers. Errors — from wrong contact information to the mistaken alert that nearly one-third of a small Montana town's population was being evacuated because of a fire — have made it online in the past month.
It's not that community meetings, phone calls and face-to-face discussions with displaced homeowners, business operators, reporters and others will go away; officials say those are key in outreach efforts. But the Internet is also important for reaching a broad and possibly growing audience, they say.
Increasingly, people seem to be using the Web as their primary source of information, in contrast to just a few years ago when phone calls and e-mails seemed more in demand, said Jackie Denk, a spokeswoman for an Arizona-based firefighting team and the Kaibab National Forest.
She believes people aren't hesitating to cruise the Web for updates on their own, and points to higher-than-normal traffic so far this year to her team's Web site — www.nazteam.com — as proof.
Traffic on the U.S. Forest Service's experimental, interagency site also has been high, given that only select fires have been posted so far, said Jon Holden, the agency's California-based specialist who developed www.inciweb.org.
The site, touted as a possible one-stop source for national fire news in the future, had about 120,000 visits in June, and about 219,000 for July by July 26, he said. Some of the entries have been updated more regularly than others.
Holden said the site, tested the past few years in California, was borne largely of his frustration with a lack of a centralized, standard reporting site for fires. He said he also was embarrassed by ‘‘abandoned'' incident sites he found online, frozen in time.
‘‘When the computers work, it's great. When they don't, it's a struggle,'' said Pat Cross, a spokesman for a fire management team recently assigned to a 92,000-acre blaze northeast of Billings.
For Terina Mullen, the flow of information from a large fire burning in ruggedly rural eastern Montana often depended on how long it took her to get to town — some 30 miles from camp — or to a hill within reach of a cell phone tower.
When fire threatened subdivisions near Columbus, Mont., this summer, it wasn't the news online that brought some comfort to two homeowners living out of state. It was the community they found through the World Wide Web after sharing their situations in the comments section of The Billings Gazette's online edition.
Barbara Beach, who was in California when the Saunders fire started, said she received dozens of e-mails from people similarly looking for answers or willing to share information.
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