As Bailey Farren helped evacuate her mother from Santa Rosa during the chaos and devastation of the Tubbs Fire in 2017, she quickly realized there were big problems with the way information was being shared with the public.

She was working for a machine learning company in Sunnyvale at the time and had to rush from the heart of Silicon Valley to the North Bay with just the barest idea of what she was heading into.

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Kiley Russell writes primarily for Local News Matters on issues related to equity and the environment. A Bay Area native, he has lived most of his life in Oakland. He studied journalism at San Francisco State University, worked for the Associated Press and the former Contra Costa Times, among other outlets. He has covered everything from state legislatures, local governments, federal and state courts, crime, growth and development, political campaigns of various stripes, wildfires and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.