Fire Fight

Outside view of the interactive map.
The details of a selected fire displayed through a react drawer.

Inspiration

As four California Bay Area based students, we were all directly impacted by many of the fires that occurred in the Northern California region. As such we sought out to bring upon awareness of the current situation that these local Californians face.

What it does

Our app provides a visual representation of the many fires located across California. Users can click on one of the many fire shaped icons to be displayed with information regarding the particular fire, the damage it caused, and how to support the victims of these travesties.

How we built it

We used we React(Material-ui) and Javascript for our front end, GeoJson and Map-Box for implementing the interactive map, and dealing with geographic data, as well as python for scraping from various fire databases.

Challenges I ran into

We all came into the project with zero react experience, therefore we had to learn along the way to understand the fundamentals of building a react based front end. Along with this we had trouble with the implementation of map box, and how it interacted with our react drawer component.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Coming together and working as a team to build a working web application over the span of 12 hours is something we feel incredibly proud of! For some of us, this was our very first hackathon, so being able to produce a final product was a validating experience. Also, the entire hackcamp staff and community was extremely welcoming, allowing us to come out of the experience with not only a large-scale project, but also several friends through the process.

What I learned

We learned how hard React is to pick up in a short amount of time, and implementing interactive components from Map Box can be quite challenging, and getting all of the components to lay nicely and interact seamlessly was a challenge to be sure.

What's next for Fire Fight

We hope to increase the amount of fires to be displayed, and continue to grow the amount natural disasters that affect people due to climate. Further more we seek to expand the scope of the project to the larger continental United States region, and maybe someday globally.