Watching a wildfire hit home--from 5,000 miles away

Facebook has been a source of direct commentary from folks who are seeing this firsthand. That's helped me keep tabs on people whose welfare I'm concerned about, but the collective commentary also has provided information that I couldn't find initially on more official sources. Joe Martz, a lab scientist and former classmate of mine from Pueblo Junior High School, stayed put even as the rest of the Los Alamos town emptied out. He's been posting updates about the fire's status on Facebook. I highly recommend LANL's Flickr photostream for sights that non-authorized personnel aren't likely to see. Its shots show the terrible beauty of a wildfire in an arid area as well as the sobering reality of the evacuation exodus. The most surprising find for me was satellite-supplied fire data from the U.S. Forest Service that can be viewed as a KMZ file in Google Earth.  There are useful official sites: the interagency fire officials' Las Conchas fire site and Twitter feed, the Forest Service's Las Conchas incident page...more