Four years earlier another conflagration swept over the region, and Fjeldheim says the company learned from that experience. “This is the second time we have had to deal with San Diego wildfires,” he says. “After the last fires, we increased our RAS capacity, along with our conference call capacity.”

And while Qualcomm Stadium is housing those displaced by the fire, the company is also helping fight the fire on another front: Fjeldheim says its cell phones are being used by some emergency personnel.

San Diego County CIO William Crowell says he was sitting on Torrey Pines Beach when the first fires broke out on Sunday morning. He says he smelled the smoke when he got home but “I thought it was the neighbor burning something.” However, by late Sunday night, he says, “we knew we had a major issue on our hands.”

At that point Crowell, who had been monitoring the fires on the news, instituted his continuity of operations plan for the IT department as the county activated its Emergency Operations Center. For Crowell and San Diego officials, the good news is that the county’s two data centers are far from the flames: one is in Tulsa and the other is in Plano, Texas, both outsourced to Northrop Grumman.

Still, Crowell has been working 12-hour shifts with other IT team members ever since Monday to support and enhance the county’s website and its 211 emergency hotline system. While the fires and ensuing evacuations have meant some of his staff have been unable to report to work, “We’ve been OK. I have a core team of key people who are coordinating various activities.”

From Crowell’s perspective, “our two biggest issues are to support the dissemination of information to the public through our Web and 211 services.”

The County’s website, which got about 400 visitors a day before the fires, saw its volume swell to more than 500,000 visits on Monday as residents sought emergency information about the spreading blazes. To support the increase in visitors and to speed performance, Crowell’s team made technical changes on the fly to separate the emergency part of the county’s website and put it on a separate server. IT had originally planned to re-architect the site in December to improve its ability to deal with dramatic volume increases; Crowell says it he may just do it now. “When you outsource, you can marshal the resources to get something like this done,” he says.