For the crews.

I live here. I built FireWatcher because when the smoke rolls in over home, I wanted us to be able to see what's happening around us — and to remember that the people out on those lines aren't strangers. A lot of them are our neighbors. The rest traveled a long way to help us.

This page is ours. Leave a note for the crews below. I read every one before it goes up.

Leave a note

Notes are read before they're posted, so it may take a bit to appear.

From the neighbors

Support the crews for real

Kind words matter. So does this — these organizations look after wildland firefighters and their families:

• Oregon Wildland Firefighter Foundation — our state's own.
• Wildland Firefighter Foundation — helps injured firefighters and the families of the fallen (4/4 on Charity Navigator).
• Grassroots Wildland Firefighters — fights for firefighter pay, health, and benefits.

Who is actually out there

A wildfire in Central Oregon is rarely fought by one organization. Depending on whose land it starts on, the response can involve a local rural fire district, the Oregon Department of Forestry, the Bureau of Land Management, the Ochoco or Deschutes National Forest, tribal crews, contract engine and hand crews, and — once a fire grows — an incident management team and hotshot crews brought in from out of the area. The dashboard names the protecting agency for each fire from the official record, so you can see who is carrying a given incident.

Behind the people on the line there are dispatchers, aircraft crews flying tankers and helicopters, camp and logistics staff, and heavy equipment operators cutting line at night. Most of them will never read this page, and the wall makes no promise that they will. The point of it is simply that this town noticed, and that the noticing is written down somewhere public.

What this page is not

This is not a way to report a fire, request help, or reach an agency. If you see smoke, call 911. If you need evacuation information, go to OR-Alert or your county sheriff's office — FireWatcher is an independent map built from public data, not an official source, and the notes here are read by one person on no particular schedule.