So I'm sitting here in San Diego which you might think is the most beautiful city in the world, but for the past day and a half has resembled something more along the lines of Mordor from The Lord of the Rings - and that is not an exaggeration. I mention this only to bring up something I've noted before, but now have first-hand experience with: Twitter's true power still lies largely untapped in breaking news and assisting in times of crisis.

There are now 7 or 8 major fires surrounding all of San Diego, 265,000 people have had to evacuate their homes so far. Communications are obviously chaotic, all over the place, but one of the few steady sources: Twitter. Quite a few people have been giving updates on the event throughout the day including Robert Scoble and Nate Ritter who is Twittering just about everything as it unfolds.

Also interesting was something I heard on my ride home through the smoke tonight. KBPS (the channel NPR is on here in San Diego) actually had their website crash after understandibly getting slammed by people wanting updates, so on the air the hosts actually told people to instead check for updates on their Twitter page (which I'm pretty sure neither host actually knew what that was)! Sure enough, they have a Twitter page and it's been live the whole time with updates.

In my opinion this is absolutely the perfect use for a service like this. Communication is sporadic, cellphones are down, websites are down, Twitter is up and able to give updates from people in the area of a disaster.

CenterNetworks has more on the different ways social media was able to shift its role today.