SAN DIEGO -- When local resident Heather Ross got the Reverse 911 call to leave her neighborhood at 4:30 a.m. Monday, she found technology made it much faster to get out.
"I do all my banking and all my insurance stuff online now," she said. "I didn't have to grab any paper this time."
Instead, she grabbed her 17-year-old son and her 10-week old puppy, left her Rancho Bernardo apartment in her pajamas, and drove away. She passed her mother's burned home has she drove out. But she wasn't worried -- she'd talked to her mom on her cell minutes earlier.
"They went north to Dana Point," Ross said. "I don't know why they went there, but I know where they are."
The fires this week highlighted the gulf between relatively affluent, technology-empowered communities, and economically strapped population centers when confronting disaster -- as well as the role serendipity can play.
When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, New Orleans residents struggled just to find food and transportation, and communication networks were destroyed by flooding. In contrast, as five fast-moving fires burned more than 280,000 acres and destroyed at least 1,200 homes and businesses, personal technology and a generally intact infrastructure helped San Diegans learn where to go, determine their loved ones were safe and monitor the status of the homes they were forced to abandon.
San Diego consistently ranks somewhere between fourth and eighth on Forbes annual lists of the most wired American cities. As home to wireless companies Qualcomm and Kyocera, as well as a host of defense industries, residents here have long relied on Wi-Fi, text-messaging, a couple of Fry's stores and family cell phone plans.
From the ease of loading data onto flash drives, to knowing banking and insurance documents were online, to checking road closures and evacuation centers, technology reduced the confusion that comes hand in hand with disasters.
"There's no question that our access to technology made this easier to handle, for organizations, emergency responders and citizens," said Peyton Roberts, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross who has been working on the evacuations of more than 500,000 of San Diego County's 2.6 million residents.
Evacuees found getting out the door lighter and easier because of technology, they said.
"My husband and I each loaded up a flash drive from our computer," said Deborah Jemmott, a San Marcos resident who needed to save years' worth of teaching plans and documents. "We didn't have to carry the computer out to the car -- we just packed our stuff."
And they were able to stay in touch with an extensive network of friends and family -- even a son in Cairo -- through the web.
"You can just jet off a sentence or two and then link them to the current fire maps," Jemmott said. "That's how we found out a friend lost his house."
The Red Cross had little more than 200 matches on its Safe and Well List website, reuniting separated people. That's a small number among half million evacuees, and, Roberts said, it seemed like cell phone plans did much of the work.
"We had far fewer people desperately trying to find each other because of the prevalence of cell phones," said George Biagi, who led the evacuation center at Qualcomm Stadium that sheltered 11,000 people. "And we had a database of evacuees so we could do a quick check when someone called from Colorado to find out about a family member."
Using e-mail and text notification, Biagi's team and the American Red Cross were able to gather much of what they needed to care for about 20,000 evacuees in nearly a dozen shelters.
"We were able to use the internet to get calls out for supplies and volunteers and give hourly updates -- we could ask for ice, for personal hygiene products and have them in less than two hours," Biagi said. "We asked for hot meals and had them in an hour. We asked for pet food and Petco sent a truck in an hour and a half."
They could find out how smaller shelters were doing and roll trucks full of supplies out to far-flung shelters.
Qualcomm itself is a Wi-Fi hub, so evacuees were able to do everything from track their property and friends, to play World of Warcraft while they waited for the all-clear to return home.
Tens of thousands of area residents relied on television news stations' websites to find out how to help, where to go and not go.
"I got a text from my friends and we all met and came here (to Qualcomm) to help out," said El Cajon high school student Kerry Torres, who showed up with seven friends and a car full of baby diapers and bottled water. "We found out what people need from the TV website and stopped at WalMart on the way."
Fate also played a significant hand in smoothing evacuation and coordination in Southern California. Unlike Katrina and the resulting flood, the California fires spared key communications facilities. Cell phones remained operations. Early on, emergency coordinators asked the public to text rather than phone to save bandwidth, and the public complied.
Seven English and Spanish language television stations and two local newspapers worked hard at their websites, updating as often as every 10 minutes. KGTV, the local ABC affiliate, reports millions of hits a day since Sunday.
"The live streaming we did was a big hit ... with people, like a guy in England who was incredibly grateful to find out his house was okay, said Davd Yirchott, the managing editor of the 10news.com.
Jamie Feldner, a Rancho Santa Fe stockbroker who fled to a downtown hotel with his wife, learned his house was still standing when a neighbor sent him a picture snapped with a cell phone. And one of the most-watched fire-related YouTube videos of the week is that of veteran newsman Larry Himmel reporting poignantly from the street in front of his house as it burned down.
For the people providing the information, this disaster has proved the value of new technology -- as well as showing there's lots to learn.
"It's a total feeling-out process where we're learning as we go," said Yirchoff. "Some of our information is being spread by Twitter and it's completely new to us. It's teaching the media how people want to consume the information we're gathering.
"People expect so much more -- a one-stop shop for what got destroyed, where the shelters and evacuations are," he continued. "And they're joining in the conversation -- they've sent us a ton of information we couldn't have gathered ourselves. Not when the whole county is on fire."
