Labor Day was a particularly bad day for fires in central Texas. If you're in that area, you may be looking for maps of where the fires are around you. Of course, you're already listening to local radio and television for news that you would need to make a decision quickly.
The Weather Underground's "WunderMap" product has a "fire" layer, which displays smoke plumes, areas that have active fires, and the perimeters of contained fires. Here's a sample from September 6, 2011 in the morning for the Austin, Texas area.
The NOAA Hazard Mapping System Fire and Smoke Product has a comprehensive index to many smoke and fire related data analysis tools, including detailed current and historic analyzed satellite imagery and other processed and raw data.
GeoMAC is the Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination Group; its fire maps draw data from MODIS, and it incorporates other data from agencies involved in fire coordination and fire fighting. This map from Tuesday evening, September 6, 2011, shows the Bastrop County Complex Fire, one of the largest fires in Texas history. For a sense of scale, the colored circles are each about a mile in diameter.
The Texas Interagency Coordination Center has incident reports, fire maps, and daily situation reports for firefighting across Texas.
The Twitter hash tags #centraltxfires and #txfire are being used for coordination, as well as a host of other tags for local fires. The Blogs of War Crisis Monitor is streaming relevant links.
Texas-Fire.com ably collects news reports of interest to Texas firefighters and other emergency professionals. Look to their Central Texas fire news page for information about fires in the region.
Radio Reference has 190 live feeds of police, fire, and amateur radio monitoring in Texas. Among those of interest are feeds for Bastrop, Harris, and Travis (Austin) counties; see feed details as several monitors capture radio signals from several counties.
Television stations KVUE (ABC; twitter @KVUE), KXAN (NBC; twitter @KXAN_News), KEYE (CBS; twitter @keyetv) and KTBC (Fox; twitter @foxaustin) all have fire coverage.
Newspapers the Austin American Statesman (Cox, daily; @statesman), Austin Chronicle (indie weekly) and the Daily Texan (U Texas student daily) all have news. It's also front page of the San Antonio Express-News (Hearst) and the Houston Chronicle (Hearst).
Radio: KLBJ news radio (590 AM, 99.7 FM) is streaming online. A full set of local radio for Austin is on OnTheRadio.net.
