Keeping an Unofficial Emergency Site Honest

Sixth day of the Bug Fire, and the site is still up. About 5,800 unique visitors have loaded it now. Dad is still at our place and the fire is past 88,000 acres and 15% contained.

I wrote yesterday about the format and the traffic. Someone on Hacker News asked the question I should have led with:

What steps are you taking to ensure there’s nothing inaccurate or harmful posted?

Two days of doing this and it turns out that’s the whole job. Building the page took an afternoon. Everything since has been deciding what it will refuse to say.

The one I got wrong

I listed the evacuation center’s address from a search result instead of checking the city’s own page, and had the wrong street number up for about ninety minutes. 1013 Valley Road instead of 1301. Nobody reported it. I found it while re-verifying links, and by then a few hundred people had loaded the page.

As far as I know nobody drove to the wrong address, but that’s a risk.

What’s instructive is where it happened. The entire premise of the site is that it points at official sources instead of being one. The only real error on the page appeared at the single spot where I retyped something myself instead of linking to it.

The one that would have been worse

The page used to say which areas were under an evacuation order versus a warning, assembled from news coverage. Then a story about FEMA funding described orders as covering “areas around Nixon,” and on that basis I moved Nixon from warning to order.

Washoe County deliberately does not publish a written zone list. Zones change through the day and are set address by address, and the county’s own guidance is to check a specific address on their map. I was manufacturing an authority they decline to claim, out of a reporter’s paraphrase, and pointing it at an area of real people.

The page no longer states anyone’s evacuation status. It lists communities that have come up in coverage, says plainly that’s from news and not the county, and says not to read absence from that list as safety. It doesn’t tell anyone to leave. The map does that.

The rules that fell out of it

Anything hand-written carries its own timestamp. The acreage and containment figures update automatically. Prose sitting next to a fresh timestamp gets an odd sort of authority, so every written block now says when it was written and that it doesn’t refresh itself.

The automation stops on anything unexpected. A script pulls the official figures hourly. When the source blanked its page during a rename, the script refused to publish rather than write zeros onto a page people were reading. A page saying “as of 3 PM” at 7 PM is recoverable. A page showing a parse artifact where the acreage should be is not. I built that script with Claude, which is why an afternoon was enough, and is also why these rules matter more than they would if I’d been typing slowly.

Every phone number belongs to a named agency. I removed two that came from news reports rather than from the organizations themselves. A wrong number fails silently for whoever dials it.

All major points need manual verification. I tried letting automation draft some of the news items. Many were fine. I’m learning to use AI the way you’d use an intern writing copy: the output is usually good and none of it ships unread. In an emergency there is a flood of material that turns out to need deleting, and facts arrive with no trace of where they came from.

Where I’ve landed

An unofficial page people trust during an evacuation is an odd thing to have made. People don’t often have the resources, time, or ability to find all of the good facts out there, so it’s useful because it’s faster and simpler than the official channels. It’s dangerous for exactly the same reason. The distance between those is made entirely of small decisions about what you’re willing to assert.

I don’t think the answer is that nobody should build these. The need is real, which is why they keep appearing, and I’ve now done it three times: Camp Fire in 2018, Dixie in 2021, this one. But if you build one, start the list of things you won’t say early. It gets longer than you expect.

Curious where other people have drawn that line. Email me if you’ve run one of these.