If you’re like me, the information that comes out of the daily incident updates isn’t worth much.

The kind of 30,000-foot overviews that tell you nothing if you’re sitting at home watching the cloud of smoke blow up a few miles away, or you’re out of town and are anxious to know what the situation is.

While it might not be a perfect solution, I’d like to introduce you to a website that could be a lifesaver — or if not right now, serve as a wealth of information in the future.

That site is the NIFC FTP Server Information site, where you’ll have access to a LOT of data, including both past and current wildfires on federal lands throughout the country.

To keep you from being totally confused about how to get access to the Lake Fire data, let me help get you through the maze of choices.

Each of the steps leads you into the FTP site in a way that allows you to see the immensity of what the site has to offer.

But if you’d like to get right to the maps, Steps 6 and 7 will take you directly to the Progression and Ops maps for Sunday, July 14.

1. Click on the link to Incident Specific Data. This will take you to regional fire incident sites throughout the nation. You could explore here forever.
2. Click on the link to calif_s to see fires in the south half of California. Here you’ll see not only current fire information, but also many of the more recent Santa Barbara area fires.
3. Click on the top link to !2024_Incidents_Federal to see what’s happening now.
4. Click on the CA-LPF-001542-Lake link to get access to a number of PDF maps for the Lake Fire.
5. Click on the GIS link and then the Products Link, and you’re there! Note there is a folder for each day of the fire, each with quite a few PDF maps, some of them pretty large in size. There are two specific maps that might be really helpful.
6. The first of these is the Fire Progression Map. Look for the map toward the bottom of the list that begins with “Prog_arch_e_land”. The file is large and will take a bit of time to download, but that will allow you to zoom in quite a ways.
7. The second of these is the Ops Overview Map. While the progression map is an excellent way to see how the fire is moving and what might be in danger next, the Ops Overview Map provides good road and location data, which can be invaluable in identifying specific locations of interest to you. This map also include perimeters for areas within the overall fire perimeter that didn’t burn.

Let’s take a look at each of those maps. The best way to do that is to save them as PDFs to your desktop and open them there where you’ll find it much easier to move around and zoom in and out.

A Quick Look at the progression map provides a view of the fire not possible in any other way. It begins in a very deep bowl at Zaca Lake (dark green blob), expands rapidly to the west and south (mid-dark green) then more rapidly to both the east and west (lighter greens) and it does this all in a day. From 0 to 16,000 acres in a day.

All this more or less along the front facing slopes of the San Rafael Mountains.

Then a few days later, the western end of the fire expansion slows down, and the fire begins to expand dramatically a few days later when it reaches the bottom of Birabent Canyon and begins to move up canyon towards Figueroa Mountain and up the grass-filled slopes to Figueroa Mountain Road.

There it crosses into the Sedgwick Reserve and over a saddle leading down to the Tunnel Ranch.

Not only is Figueroa Mountain completely surrounded by fire, but the valley is now being threatened. Given the expansion on the north side of Figueroa Mountain, it appears the fire may burn into the Manzana Creek drainage.

Sitting in town, the mountains choked with smoke, it was easy to feel helpless. On my Facebook page, there are dozens of questions, many of which might have been answered and possibly fears assuaged, had you checked the progression map on a daily basis.

Daily Ops Map vs Progression Map

While I’ve zoomed in on the main part of the Ops Map, it provides a level of detail the Progression Map doesn’t: roads, features, landmarks, structures like the Schoolhouse and many others are clearly labelled.

You can see where bulldozer lines have been established, which in the Sedgwick area seem to be everywhere. Along the Happy Canyon and Sunset Valley areas, it provides much better detail of what has and hasn’t burned along the fire perimeter.

Hopefully you can see how using the maps can provide you with a much better understanding of what is happening on the Lake Fire, and give you the tools you’ll need when the next one occurs.

And it will.