CRETSINGER wrote:Due to all the fires in Southern California, add an option for the police/fire authorities to automatically block off areas due natural disasters such as out of control fires, flooding, land slides, etc.

There already is a mechanism for municipal authorities to place closures on the map. The program is called CCP and more details can be found here:
https://www.waze.com/ccp
However, I will add that most agencies don't have the resources (people) available during an emergency to add map closures.

Currently Waze is directing drivers in Southern California into neighborhood's that are on fire. This is placing drivers in harm's way and blocking traffic for those attempting to flee and/or making it difficult for authorities to do their job.

That is gross generalization. Regarding the Skirball Fire, I began adding closures to the Waze map at 5:50am, within the first hour of the incident. While we live in a world with instant access to lots of information, it does take some time for emergency resources to begin closing roads and for that information to be shared with the media and community. Also, not every street closures gets announced; that is why the Waze app allows motorist to report them. I’m confident that Waze will continue to evolve and improve their ability to help the community during an emergency.

Due to all the fires in Southern California, add an option for the police/fire authorities to automatically block off areas due natural disasters such as out of control fires, flooding, land slides, etc. Currently Waze is directing drivers in Southern California into neighborhood's that are on fire. This is placing drivers in harm's way and blocking traffic for those attempting to flee and/or making it difficult for authorities to do their job.

Despite the hard work of fabulous folks like citeman, and not wanting to take anything away from that -- still, I could never suggest to a friend that they should depend on volunteers with the right information, sufficient time, editable area, and adequate Internet access appearing during every emergency. It's nice when it happens, but I fear absolute dependability is an unattainable goal.

In the future, I would really like to see better user-level crowdsourced-reporting tools in Waze, so that residents of an area can share information. This happened during last year's floods and mudslides in my area, users would comment on the Waze closure reports to add valuable on-site info that others could see. But this would only work if there was cell coverage, and the information would go away when the closure was removed.

Yet there is something we CAN do now, and that is to remove impassible through routes from those oodles of ancient two-track and fire-roads left over from base map. We may not be able to guarantee that Waze will know about every real-time closure in an emergency, but we can remove roads that were effectively closed decades ago either intentionally or through disuse and lack of maintenance.

When I edit more remote areas I always make it a priority to identify and eliminate bogus through routes, and always wonder if maybe one day in an emergency I might have saved someone from disaster.

@DwarfLord for the same reason you mentioned in your post, new AM's would need to be granted because there's no cell service to gain EA in these remote parts. It's a two prong issue. Need to clean up the area, but only a few have access to the areas that need to be cleaned up. Maybe time for a mapraid in the remote areas of California?

aerobat1,
There are some holes in that story. Discussion has already been had on Discord. Closures were getting set almost immediately by citeman. Between citeman and machado808, anything announced was closed immediately and in some cases before announcement through citeman's experience with this sort of thing.

What people need to remember is that we can only input what's available from mostly public sources. Eventually the LA CCP side of the house got involved. Outside of that, drivers should remember that they are the best source of reporting closures via the app. If drivers did that at least 1/2 of the time, I bet most of this would be a non-issue.