Russell, Sorry to hear this news. For those who didn't click through to the BBC article, 19 firefighters from a specially trained team were killed by a fire in Arizona making it one of the most deadly firefighting accidents in US history. This is definitely not the news we wanted to see from this fire.
Regarding the activation issues, I think it is good that you are interested in taking on the coordinator role and I would agree that you are a good person to do that for this mapping project, and you have already done a good job coordinating the mapping so far. Other members of the community should weigh in as well, on whether this should move towards full activation or not, but the situation is definitely more serious than it originally appeared. It will be interesting to see what comes out of your communications with the Forest Service and others. If we can start getting more feedback from them we could probably help out significantly, but due to the large size of the area involved we need to be able to focus our efforts more precisely to be of much use beyond just generally improving the OSM coverage in the region. I would say this is the key thing we need to work on for this event: knowing where more data would be useful, and what kind of data specifically. I would think building tracing is probably of greatest use to the organizations, as they likely have forest maps of their own, but their building coverage is probably their weak spot, but that is just speculation on my part. -AndrewBuck
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