Crisis Map

Inspiration

Hurricane Milton has affected millions of lives in the Southeastern portion of the United States inducing one of the biggest evacuations in history, with more than 5 million residents in the East Coast receiving orders to evacuate for safety. Thinking about if we were in their shoes, we thought about how easy it would have been if we access to all the information we need for our safety in a single area: weather status, evacuation routes, emergency relief; all of this information would be a necessity in a dire situation where time and information affects your safety.

What it does

At its current state, our project accepts a zip code as user input, grabbing the weather conditions of that area and visualizing this information on the main map of the front page.

How we built it

We implemented the project through Reflex, a framework allowing developers to create fullstack websites through Python. We utilized multiple APIs, including Google Map's API and Openweathermap's API for weather condition gathering.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was learning the new tools at our disposal. CalHacks introduced lots of technologies we haven't heard of before: Reflex, FetchAI, and Hume. We ran into many errors learning Reflex, kept running into API pricing issues, and the limited bandwidth of the hackathon venue made it difficult to make progress. We thought of lots of different ways we might have been able to use these tools, but had to narrow down our vision in order to make project completion feasible within the time limit. Learning these new tools on the fly was a tough challenge, but it was a great learning experience nonetheless.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite being cobbled-together, we're proud of the logic we came up with user input and data returning. We managed to get the first stages of the heatmap working.

What we learned

We're most proud of the new skills we learned, figuring out how to implement APIs, heatmaps, and website deployment. We're proud of learning Reflex within 36 hours since we were able to build our website using python instead of just HTML/JS/CSS.

What's next for Crisis Map

In the future we plan on incorporating more data from governments and official resources, giving users in a single space access to multiple resources and information they would normally have trouble finding. We plan on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to find the best evacuation routes given factors like weather patterns, infrastructure status, and shelter availability, giving the real-time critical data to users. We also aim to refine the severity calculations and explore expansion into other types of crises, such as wildfires and earthquakes.