This is Kris Eriksen, NIMO PIO. I wanted to pass along some information from a NIFC webinar I was involved in today; many of you may not have seen it as it was aimed at PAO's and PIO's. I have been working with Ben Butler and his group at NIFC for almost 2 years on a fire information app called Wildfires Near Me, which was announced on the NIFC 2016 NEW PIO TECH TOOLS webinar! We're pretty excited about it and hope it will be very useful to the public.
The app is based on a similar tool I was introduced to while on the 2014 Bushfire Study Tour of Australia and New Zealand and it focuses on a largely untapped niche - information about new and emerging fires.
It's a tool that takes official fire information downloaded directly from dispatch immediately upon being reported, and merges it with twitter discussions filtered to only tweets about new and emerging fires. It incorporates social media allowing users to tweet or post to facebook without having to leave the app and includes the ability to create a personalized stream of information or alerts about fires near specific locations via texts or emails.
If you'd like to play with the Wildfires Near me tool on the web, go here:
http://www.wildfiresnearme.wfmrda.com/
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