(AP Photo)

On June 20, a massive dry, low-pressure weather system moved over California and resulted in over 6,000 lightning strikes, sparking more than 2,000 fires across 26 heavily wooded northern and central California counties. Southern Oregon was also struck.

At the peak, 2,093 wildfires burned simultaneously in California. By early July, over 25,000 personnel had been committed, along with 1503 engines, 291 bulldozers, 423 water tenders, 142 helicopters, and 400 National Guard soldiers. When it was over, weeks later, 1.2 million acres (1,562 square miles) had burned, according to California fire authorities and the U.S. Forest Service.

Finding accurate, up-to-date information during such calamities is always difficult, not only for civilians but also for responding emergency agencies. Sporadic, unfiltered information is likely to come from many news and government organizations, little of it integrated into a single, current and coherent picture of events on the ground.

Some help may be a click away in the form of a new Web site appropriately called Wildfire from Fetch Technologies, Los Angeles.

The Wildfire portal is designed to aggregate all relevant fire-related information from both public and private sources in one place so people can quickly and effectively make decisions based on a wide variety of information, said Fetch Technologies CEO Robert Landes.

Landes said Wildfire, funded by a grant from NASA, can be used by fire, police and sheriff’s departments and other government agencies to access fire information in one convenient place. Ordinary citizens, unsettled by the sight and smell of smoke and interested perhaps in what roads are still open or the current status of community evacuation orders, can also use the system.

"It will enable disjointed and disconnected information sources to be associated directly with pinpoint accuracy where fires occur and how they can affect us as citizens," Landes said.

Wildfire pulls information about active wildfires from NASA, InciWeb, GeoMAC, the Wildland Fire Assessment System, thousands of news sites, and federal, local and state agencies; photos from Flikr; and videos from news agencies and YouTube, all displayed on annotated geospatial maps.

The system uses innovative techniques to collect and sort information, including the use of proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning methods that automatically parse relevant data from thousands of structured and unstructured Web data sources, including "deep Web" information. Deep Web data, unindexed by search engines, is estimated to be several magnitude larger than the surface Web.

The Wildfire portal is currently in beta form, showcasing the technology for demonstration purposes. When fully operational, Landes said it will have the capability of handling thousands of users simultaneously.