Over the weekend, a wildfire started right outside our city. By Sunday, it had been declared the top wildfire priority in the country. On Tuesday, it broke out of Queen’s Canyon and hit 65 mph winds and exploded. One official at the press conference the next morning said “I’ve seen many fires and I’ve never seen a fire do this.” It burned Historic Flying W Ranch to the ground, surged into residential areas and another 25,000 people were evacuated in hours. An unofficial count based on an aerial survey put the number of lost homes Wednesday at over 300. Yesterday afternoon, infuriated officials finally released a preliminary count of lost homes at 346. And, they announced that, with a lot of help, they’d finally achieved 10% containment and were starting to make progress.

That’s essentially the story you get via the news outlets that are covering the story. There’s always more to the story. At yesterday’s 4pm press conference, officials praised people that had invited evacuees, complete strangers, into their homes. We had shelters that opened without sleeping bags and had them within hours. People have donated tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the main local food bank. A group of designers came together, designed t-shirts, put them up for sale to support victims. By yesterday, they had passed $100,000.

Much of it was organized via Twitter. Twitter has been the center of grass roots organizing to help victims of the fire and get news out. Members of the local the local media and people listening to police scanners kept us updated. People jumped in to relay needs and meet them. People were there for each other. It’s estimated that 5 to 8 million people have followed the hashtag (#WaldoCanyonFire). That’s ten times the population of the Colorado Springs metropolitan area and more than the population of the entire state. Our twitter community was bigger than our physical one.

Everyone has heard of the 140 character (and one photo) limit for twitter. Type a short sentence and you’re done. Two key things are left out of the discussion. The whole things revolves around people (@coyote4til7 or @SpringsAlliance) and topics (#WaldoCanyonFire, #FireBeard, #WeatherControlSatellites). Even the interface revolves around that with the standard home and me complimented by ones for hashtags and handles.

If you want to talk to or about someone, put their handle (always beginning with an @) in the message. If you want to talk about something, use the hashtag (always beginning with a #).

Find someone interesting? Tap their handle and click ‘follow’ and you’ll get to read their tweets. Something interesting going on? It’s a simple search for the hashtag except that it lets you see new tweets posted on the subject (or at least its hashtag) as they come in.

Ready to get started with the #FireBeard challenge, help with #WaldoCanyonFire, learn about #WeatherControlSatellites or connect with someone who needs to #hire?