Fire Tracker

In the fall of 2013, we had a problem. California's wildfire season had exploded, so much so that our web producers were scrambling to update multiple stories with basic data and social media footage. At the same time, our audio producers were doing the same thing for their on-air coverage.  Our web and radio coverage was often out of sync. Our producers were spending hours refreshing the same fire incident reports for new information. And our stories often lacked the perspective of those most affected by the wildfires.

 Working with our designers, developers, data editor and digital producers, we came up with a way to automatically scrape the data elements (fire size, location, containment, buildings burned and threatened, air quality, etc.) from their various governmental sources online and present that information as an embeddable component on our site. 
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​Read more about this project from the data editor who produced much of it.

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