Keeping an Unofficial Emergency Site Honest · Lance Orner<br>Sixth day of the Bug Fire, and the site is<br>still up. About 5,800 unique visitors have loaded it now. Dad is still at our<br>place and the fire is past 88,000 acres and 15% contained.<br>I wrote yesterday about the format<br>and the traffic. Someone on Hacker News asked the question I should have led<br>with:<br>What steps are you taking to ensure there’s nothing inaccurate or harmful<br>posted?
Two days of doing this and it turns out that’s the whole job. Building the<br>page took an afternoon. Everything since has been deciding what it will<br>refuse to say.<br>The one I got wrong<br>I listed the evacuation center’s address from a search result instead of<br>checking the city’s own page, and had the wrong street number up for about<br>ninety minutes. 1013 Valley Road instead of 1301. Nobody reported it. I<br>found it while re-verifying links, and by then a few hundred people had loaded<br>the page.<br>As far as I know nobody drove to the wrong address, but that’s a risk.<br>What’s instructive is where it happened. The entire premise of the site is<br>that it points at official sources instead of being one. The only real error<br>on the page appeared at the single spot where I retyped something myself<br>instead of linking to it.<br>The one that would have been worse<br>The page used to say which areas were under an evacuation order versus a<br>warning, assembled from news coverage. Then a story about FEMA funding<br>described orders as covering “areas around Nixon,” and on that basis I moved<br>Nixon from warning to order.<br>Washoe County deliberately does not publish a written zone list. Zones change<br>through the day and are set address by address, and the county’s own guidance<br>is to check a specific address on their map. I was manufacturing an authority<br>they decline to claim, out of a reporter’s paraphrase, and pointing it at an<br>area of real people.<br>The page no longer states anyone’s evacuation status. It lists communities<br>that have come up in coverage, says plainly that’s from news and not the<br>county, and says not to read absence from that list as safety. It doesn’t tell<br>anyone to leave. The map does that.<br>The rules that fell out of it<br>Anything hand-written carries its own timestamp. The acreage and<br>containment figures update automatically. Prose sitting next to a fresh<br>timestamp gets an odd sort of authority, so every written block now<br>says when it was written and that it doesn’t refresh itself.<br>The automation stops on anything unexpected. A script pulls the official<br>figures hourly.<br>When the source blanked its page during a rename, the script refused to publish<br>rather than write zeros onto a page people were reading. A page saying “as of<br>3 PM” at 7 PM is recoverable. A page showing a parse artifact where the<br>acreage should be is not. I built that script with Claude, which is why an<br>afternoon was enough, and is also why these rules matter more than they would<br>if I’d been typing slowly.<br>Every phone number belongs to a named agency. I removed two that came from<br>news reports rather than from the organizations themselves. A wrong number<br>fails silently for whoever dials it.<br>All major points need manual verification. I tried letting automation<br>draft some of the news items. Many were fine. I’m learning to use AI the way<br>you’d use an intern writing copy: the output is usually good and none of it<br>ships unread. In an emergency there is a flood of material that turns out to<br>need deleting, and facts arrive with no trace of where they came from.<br>Where I’ve landed<br>An unofficial page people trust during an evacuation is an odd thing<br>to have made. People don’t often have the resources, time, or ability to find<br>all of the good facts out there, so it’s useful because it’s faster and simpler<br>than the official channels. It’s dangerous for exactly the same reason. The<br>distance between those is made entirely of small decisions about what you’re<br>willing to assert.<br>I don’t think the answer is that nobody should build these. The need is real,<br>which is why they keep appearing, and I’ve now done it three times: Camp Fire<br>in 2018, Dixie in 2021, this one. But if you build one, start the list of<br>things you won’t say early. It gets longer than you expect.<br>Curious where other people have drawn that line.<br>Email me if you’ve run one of these.