This is something I've been wondering for a while:

If you wanted to know about something going on in your community or a community you're traveling through, how do you do it? I'll give two examples:

1) today I was driving to the shore for the long weekend. As I was driving through what I believe was Delaware, I could see in the distance an enormous cloud of smoke. I didn't drive directly by it, but it was clearly visible from dozens of miles away. As I passed as close to it as I got (around 10 miles, best I could judge), I saw several emergency vehicles pass the other way, clearly headed toward it, including a huge tanker truck from the fire dept.

I'm a curious person, so I was wondering what happened. I've been trying to search Google and even Twitter for a while now, but haven't found anything. All I could come up with was another massive fire on Sunday night/Monday morning, but that was two days ago, so this had to be something else (or perhaps the first fire wasn't as contained as they thought).

2) about three years ago, I was driving home late at night, about 3 miles from my house, when I found myself driving through the scene of a huge accident. There was a car upside-down, a half dozen ambulances, a dozen police cruisers, and even a helicopter. This being the suburbs, it was quite a scene. I tried my best at the time to find out what happened, and if everyone was alright, but was never able to. At this point I'm certain it would be difficult to find out, but if anyone wants to try I can post the details on the location.


So how do you guys search for this kind of stuff?