cleaRoute
Every country and every city in the world has fallen to a natural disaster resulting in the death of innocent lives. Wildfires. Tornados. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. These are occurring all over the world and despite the development of technology to detect and allow populations to escape to safer places, there is still an unimaginably high death toll that occurs. In the last 10 years, the world has suffered over 600,000 deaths due to natural disasters reference-style link. And most recently the California wildfires have led to the death of 42 people, the deadliest wildfire to occur in the states history! reference-style link
We have the technology to predict and detect these disasters. We have the infrastructure for escape. But we don’t have a proper alert system or plans of escape. Uncertainty and emotions rile up and every second counts. News channels can report on impending natural disasters and social media can advertise the disaster but by the time people are aware of the danger, they can’t escape. In the recent California fires, the only way to receive alerts of an impeding wildfire were if residents had signed up for the SoCoAlerts system. Only roughly 10,000 of the 500,000 residents were signed up and received the single alert sent out. reference-style link That means 98% of the residents were not alerted. By the time residents knew about the dangers, they were being woken up by neighbors and called by family members, but the fire was already rapidly spreading. But an even bigger issue was that once everybody learned of this danger, they were all taking the same route of escape. Creating a bottleneck for all major routes, resulting in a slow and scary escape experience full of uncertainty.
This is where cleaRoute comes in! We are creating a system that will alert residents of the impending natural disaster and direct them to the safest and quickest routes for escape. The way to ensure this will be to direct every 20% of the population on a different escape route. This will diminish the bottleneck and traffic that occurs from everybody following the same one route and will get people to safety faster.
Key Features
• Evacuation Routes: Uses Google Maps to connect you to the nearest safest evacuation route for your area. We would work with local governments to provide these routes based on the natural disaster occurring. We would also implement a more general evacuation algorithm for areas, which do not have evacuation plans, which takes into account a point which needs to be evacuated from, and a safe distance away that should be reached.
• Route Load Balancing: One of the major issues in an evacuation is that many people take the same route to leave, resulting in bottlenecks and traffic jams. Our app aims to take into account how many people are using which route to equally distribute traffic to ensure that traffic flows smoothly and people can evacuate the area safely. We would integrate real-time traffic data and combine this with how many people our app sent on which route to calculate safe routes, which contribute to traffic as minimally as possible.
• Alert Services: Sign up for our disaster alert services to be notified when a fire is in your area so you have ample time to prepare. Too many lives have been lost just to a lack of notifications.
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