![]() ![]() “Even I know it's a weird thing to be doing,” he says. The irony, perhaps, is that Michael has never been to California. When he hears what he thinks is an essential detail of a fire’s movements, he tweets it in real time to more than 100,000 followers. The app only lets him follow 25 agencies per phone, so he runs another two phone emulators on his PC to cover even more departments. The phones let him keep track of more than 100 agencies across California: Los Angeles County Fire, LAFD, Marin County, Sacramento, Napa County. When emergency workers respond to a distress call, the app sends him a notification. On his desk sit four phones: one personal device and three devoted to running PulsePoint, an app that monitors the radio channels first responders use. “Radio traffic said expanding evacs, but nothing through social media channels yet.” It’s one of several dozen tweets he sends out that night.ĭuring California’s long fire season-roughly May through October-Michael sits at his desk all day, sometimes for 18-hour stretches, keeping watch over that single state’s blazes. His fingers flying across his keyboard, Michael composes a tweet, starting with the #CaldorFire hashtag: “Strongly recommend evacuating if you're north of this, especially in the Happy Valley area: extreme fire behavior & Grizzly Flats is already impacted,” he types. As he absorbs their urgent messages, he realizes that people still haven’t gotten out of their homes. First responders are barking orders and calling for help. ![]() He wears a pair of noise-canceling Sennheiser headphones as he listens to the overlapping chatter of several emergency scanners covering the Caldor Fire area. Michael is 30, with a stocky build, bright blue eyes, and unkempt brown hair, and is his alter ego. He flicks through dozens of browser tabs-maps, weather predictions, aircraft flight trackers, social media feeds-as he watches the Caldor Fire spread. It’s winter in New Zealand, and the outside is cold and dreary. Johnston plays a bit of Animal Crossing to try to distract herself, but she can’t stop thinking about her house.Īn ocean away, Michael Silvester sits at a computer in his frigid bedroom. The brand-new flowers for her memorial garden. The pile of her clothes that Johnston hoped to make into a quilt. The big oak desk where her mom loved to sit. ![]() She thinks about all the things she couldn't fit into her car. ![]() On the county sheriff’s Facebook page, she finds an evacuation map that now includes her house. Johnston checks the official government maps showing the blaze’s outermost edges, but they haven't been updated in nearly 24 hours. Officials shut down the roads in the area. That night, much of Grizzly Flats burns to the ground. She flees to a town called Diamond Springs, a few miles away, and stays at her boyfriend’s place. She squeezes her cat, Chelsea, and dog, Niner, into the car, climbs into the driver’s seat, and leaves. Her heart racing, she dashes into the house and packs up the few belongings she can fit in her Toyota CR-V-photo albums, her dad’s ashes, her mom’s old coat. She sees tweets saying the fire is bearing down on the nearby town of Grizzly Flats, and she starts to panic. She checks Facebook, which is abuzz with the chatter of other locals hunting for information. Johnston pulls out her phone to try to track the fire’s path. ![]()
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