Peter Sklar, founder of Edhat and the meeting’s moderator, said that the site had assumed the responsibility “to gather every piece of information on our website” during the Gap Fire. Sklar said that people had communicated a frustration about the lack of information, prompting him to organize the forum.

Hilary Long, a Winchester Canyon resident, held up a tiny radio that she listened to for information during the fire. “We can’t just rely on one source of information,” she said. “This radio does get KEYT3, but they were playing 'Supernanny.’”

Long was one of many residents who said that formerly scheduled programming should have been dropped for emergency broadcasts.

“Do we have an (Emergency Operations Center)?” asked Sally Saenger of Mission Canyon. “All of these agencies have to communicate in an emergency and what we saw is that they aren’t,” she said.

Saenger said she wanted to see clear, consistent information from a variety of sources, more updates and a timely alert system.

Several residents said that information they received was only as good as what the media was told, and said they kept hearing the same message, regardless of medium.

Finding updated maps was also a challenge for many during the Gap Fire, and the topic was raised during the meeting. Capt. Eli Iskow, public information officer for Santa Barbara County Fire Department, stood up and explained how the maps worked. Aircraft equipped with infrared sensors took flight every evening and shot images of the fire, charting its edges, and those images were then overlayed on a topographic map to show location, he said.

“That map only happens once a day,” he said, and personnel radio in any changes that get penciled in by hand. “It’s the best there is,” he said, but admitted “It’s a problem ... it’s always going to be a day old.”

Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum, county Communications Director William Boyer and Kirsten Deshler, public information officer for the city of Goleta, also attended the forum.