Wired: The Twitter Wildfire Watcher Who Tracks California’s Blazes

Wired: The Twitter Wildfire Watcher Who Tracks California’s Blazes. “During California’s long fire season—roughly May through October—Michael [Silvester] sits at his desk all day, sometimes for 18-hour stretches, keeping watch over that single state’s blazes…. The phones let him keep track of more than 100 agencies across California: Los Angeles County Fire, LAFD, Marin County, Sacramento, Napa County. 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. 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 irony, perhaps, is that Michael has never been to California. He’s never even left New Zealand.”