Notoriety doesn’t come easily in a place as big as Seattle.

But former Geneva resident John Eberly, who became part of the metropolitan area’s population of 3.8 million in late 2005, rose quickly from obscurity to the business pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

He did it with something that slingers of computer slang call “hacking together a little mash-up.”

Unfortunately, what he accomplished in his spare time over a period of a few weeks ended about a year later under circumstances that did not endear him to the local fire department.

What Eberly did, to the immense satisfaction of the area’s Internet surfers, was design a computer-savvy system for posting and plotting each of the department’s calls on a Web site map about as quickly as firetrucks were dispatched.

It was there for all to see at Seattle911.com.

“From my point of view, I was just providing them a service and saving the taxpayer some money,” said the 32-year-old Eberly, seated at his mother’s kitchen table during a holiday visit to his hometown.

From the firefighters’ point of view, posting and plotting at one-minute intervals was contributing to a security risk.

Helen Fitzpatrick, spokeswoman for a department that includes almost 1,100 firefighters, had no trouble recalling the situation Friday in a telephone interview.

While not suggesting that Eberly was up to anything suspicious, Fitzpatrick said the department changed the way it logged its computer data to short-circuit the mapping connection.

“We don’t want somebody who might wish to do the fire department harm — we don’t want them to have the ability to see where all the units are at a given point in time on a map,” she said.

A map that does that “points out our vulnerabilities. And that is the security issue for us.”

Eberly picked up some of his basic computer skills as he earned a physics degree from Nebraska Wesleyan and then a mechanical engineering degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

The polishing phase followed as he worked for five years at the Caterpillar Claas manufacturing plant on Omaha’s outskirts from 1999 through 2004. Although the main objective there was building harvesting equipment, Eberly showed the kind of skill that landed him in the information technology department.

Along the way, he started a part-time business reselling Internet phone service and met a significant other whose pursuit of a doctorate degree took them to Seattle.

Not long after their arrival in the Northwest, Eberly indulged his curiosity about never-ending sirens by logging on to the fire department’s Web site.

“When we moved, there were these constant sirens and I thought, ‘What’s going on in my neighborhood? Is there something I need to be concerned about here?’”

Others trying to answer that question might have picked up the telephone. Eberly set his fingers to walking across his keyboard.

He wrote a computer program that transferred the fire department data to a map on his own Web site.

The initial response, as he described it, was decidedly positive.

As a matter of his own neighborhood awareness, the map quickly clued him to a gas leak. He called his student girlfriend and said, “Stay away for right now. There’s no reason to come here.”

In the bigger picture, emergency medical technicians from far beyond Seattle offered responses like “‘Great data. I wish we had that data where I live.’”

Closer to home, “One of the (city) council persons wrote back and said it was awesome. He was going to pass along what he knew to the fire department.”

The subsequent headline in the Seattle newspaper read: “Web site that tracks 911 calls ignites concerns about security.”

Eberly said he stopped his map postings as quickly as he learned that the department had concerns.

He’s sure he could adjust his program to the change in the fire department’s information flow and continue. But he won’t.

That doesn’t mean he’s entirely happy about the way things turned out.

Nor were most of the dozens of people who sent supportive e-mail messages his way.

“I wonder if making it harder to avoid areas with emergency vehicles will be a greater threat than some far-fetched terrorist planning tool?” wrote somebody identified as “xyzzy.”

Eberly has his own questions.

“I think we should all ask what we’re getting in exchange for public information being taken away from us in the name of security,” he said. “Are we really becoming safer because of this decision?”

Firefighter spokeswoman Fitzpatrick pointed out “the public still has access to the same information, which we offer on a real-time dispatch.”

But the map is gone.

Has Eberly learned any kind of lesson?

Yes, but not the one you might think. The lesson is about what his notoriety has done to his own sense of privacy.

“Once your name is out there,” he said, “people try to figure out everything about you.”

Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.