Reading the live map

Four statuses, and the color is the urgency:

• ·Red — Evacuation Order. Leave now if you can do so safely.
• ·Amber — Evacuation Warning. Be ready to leave. Pack essentials, keep your phone charged.
• ·Purple — Shelter in Place. Stay indoors. Close windows and doors.
• ·Green — Clear to Repopulate. You may return. Check conditions before traveling.

Red is deliberately reserved for act now and nothing else, so a red shape on the map always means the same thing. The zone labels are the same identifiers your county uses on its own map.

This is a relay of what the authorities currently publish. Always follow the official order for your zone, not the color on any app.

Usually because there is nothing active there — but read it carefully, because there are two different reasons and only one is good news.

• ·In our coverage, nothing active — genuinely no evacuation zone in effect at that point.
• ·Outside our coverage — we have no evacuation data for that location at all.

Live evacuation zones come from the California statewide aggregation, so outside California there is nothing to show. The response says which case you are in.

An empty result is not an all-clear. Check the fire and shelter layers too, which are nationwide, and check your own county or state emergency management. A blank map is the absence of data, not the absence of danger.

Because the county has not updated that record recently, and we would rather tell you than quietly imply it is fresh.

Counties sometimes leave a zone sitting at an active status long after the incident. So each zone carries its age, and anything older than 14 days is flagged with its age and a pointer to the county's own page.

Very old records are dropped entirely, on windows that match each status's real tempo: Orders after 30 days, Warnings after 14, Shelter in Place after 3, Clear to Repopulate after 14.

The bias is deliberate: hiding a real order is worse than showing a slightly stale one. A zone with no readable timestamp is kept, because unknown age is not evidence of staleness. If a zone looks old, treat the county as the source of truth.

They are two separate layers answering two different questions.

• ·Fire events are points — a satellite or weather-service detection saying *something is burning near here*. They appear quickly.
• ·Fire perimeters are boundaries — the mapped outline of an incident, with acreage and containment.

The practical consequence: a fire can be real, visible, and in the news without having a boundary yet. Perimeters exist only where the interagency source has mapped the incident, and mapping lags detection.

So if you see a point and no shape, that is not a contradiction — it usually means the fire is new. Use the point for *where*, the perimeter for *how big and how contained*.

It is a 0-100 score of how fire-friendly the current weather is at that spot — not how large or dangerous the fire itself is.

Bands: 80+ extreme · 60+ high · 40+ moderate · 20+ elevated, below that low.

Two honest caveats. This is our own index, not an official product — it is not the National Weather Service's fire danger rating, and you should not quote it as one. And it describes *weather*, so a low number next to a large fire does not mean the fire is safe. A separate Red Flag marker is the real thing: that comes straight from a National Weather Service alert.

It means the wind at that hazard is blowing in roughly your direction — the map is doing the mental arithmetic for you.

Weather reports name the direction wind comes from, which is the opposite of where it is going, and that inversion is easy to get backwards when it matters. So instead we compare where the wind is heading against where you are:

• ·Within 45° of your direction — *pushing toward you*
• ·135° or more away — *pushing away from you*
• ·In between — *moving across your area*

It only says this for hazards within 50 km. Further out you get plain compass wording instead, because a hazard 200 km away "pushing toward you" is noise rather than information.

Wind shifts. This describes the last reading, not a forecast.

Coastal states pre-divide the map into lettered zones — A through E — by how vulnerable the ground is to storm surge. Zone A floods first and evacuates first.

When a storm approaches, officials do not evacuate by category or by city; they call zones. That is why knowing your letter ahead of time matters more than watching the forecast: it converts a complicated storm into one question, *has my letter been called.*

On our map these zones are available for Florida and South Carolina. Elsewhere, your county emergency management office publishes the equivalent.

Look yours up on a calm day. It does not change, and it is much harder to find once a warning is active.