Bespoke Websites for Emergencies are an Active Thing

Header card from bugfireinfo.com reading “Evacuation & Fire Information”, “Bug Fire”, “Check your address. Find official updates.”, for Washoe County, Nevada and Lassen and Sierra Counties, California, with a note that it is an unofficial public resource linking to official sources and that you should call 9-1-1 in an emergency

Yesterday near Reno, NV, we had the “Bug” Fire expand rapidly due to heat and wind, and evacuation orders were issued by the County for several nearby neighborhoods. Facebook, Reddit, and Social Media were aflutter with pictures of the fire, questions about the evacuations, and people looking for info. Dad was affected, so he and the dog are now staying with us for a couple days. All is good for now.

I’m at my desk all day, and there’s nothing I can do about the fire, but I can register a domain name, and throw a website together with Claude’s help. Boom, https://bugfireinfo.com is born. I posted about it yesterday when it went up.

Bespoke websites for emergencies are now a thing that I’ve seen pop up more and more. I created similar sites of links for the Paradise Camp Fire in 2018 and the Almanor Dixie Fire in 2021. A clearly non-official site with all of the links from all of the official sites, including Fire, Sheriff, County, Red Cross, and anybody else that might be relevant.

I also created a single-issue website about a washed out road I care about. This is easier to post in Social Media when you’re trying to get attention. A single site with all of the information.

A single website URL is much easier to give to friends and family, who don’t really know how to look up the data on their own, but it’s something that can be put in a text message. “Go to this site,” is all you need to say. They’re happy.

Website traffic in the past 24 hrs confirms this. At peak, I was getting 14 unique/min, now down to about 90 visitors an hour, both of which are easily handled by a couple of static pages on a cheap compute server somewhere. First references came from Facebook and Reddit, but as time goes on, more is coming by direct search. Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack have all fetched link previews, which means the URL is getting pasted into private chats even though those clicks then show up as “direct”. I’m getting real referrals from Teams and even Bluesky. The Teams means it’s probably being shared in work chats. My little URL is being copied around and given to people who want quick information. This is the entire intent of this project.

Best of all, 53% of the visitors are in Nevada, and Reno and Sparks are the top two cities by a wide margin. It reached the people it was for.

Search referrals are also interesting, in last three hours, Bing 76, Yahoo 43, DuckDuckGo 28, and Google 18. Despite the size of Google, they’re last, only because I assume some random website is being deprioritized to official sources, which is probably the correct thing to do.

I’ve got Claude doing a web search for me every hour, summarizing new news, and proposing changes to the site. I’m not really trying to drive any traffic, I’ve got no advertising, and I don’t want to compete with real news sites. I just want a list of links I can give to people.

There seems to be a real need for these custom emergency sites. That’s probably a good thing. We tech people will provide. I don’t know where this leads from here.

Email me if you’d like, but I’m also going to post this to Hacker News, and I’d love to see some discussion of a new trend like this. Maybe it’s not a new trend, but with AI tools like Claude, it’s definitely much easier to create.