FireEscape

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Inspiration

In recent years, the west coast has experienced some of the longest and most destructive fire seasons on record. Growing congruently with these fire seasons are communities within the wildland urban interface (WUI), where wildfire presents the greatest risk. As firefighting resources are stretched to their maximum, emergency management notification systems are lagging, putting WUI communities at even greater risk. By integrating GIS with alerting systems, those affected can access lifesaving real-time fire tracking, evacuation routing, and other important resources. Our GIS analysis investigated the Oak Fire, which began the day of the hackathon and doubled in size daily throughout the entire weekend.

What it does

Our goal was to create an all-inclusive mapping application that identifies fire evacuee resources & the safest route to them.

How we built it

To accomplish this task we utilized ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS WebApp Builder, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Enterprise. We incorporated data pertaining to wildfire threat, road network, evacuation shelters, and the user’s location to output the optimal path.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge our team encountered was running spatial analyst tools as a widget in ArcGIS WebApp Builder. It took us lot of time to figure out how to run the spatial analysis geoprocessing tools through Enterprise Sever and integrate it into our WebApp.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of producing an output that incorporates advanced GIS techniques to solve ongoing problems in our area.

What we learned

Producing a functional mapping application in one weekend is difficult. We wish we had more time to refine and develop our app. It takes a big team with a variety of skills to accomplish such an ambitious goal!

What's next for FireEscape

We hope to seamlessly incorporate evacuation shelters, wildfire perimeter & evacuation zones, and the user's location into a real-time routing application.