Inspiration
We are both from Las Vegas and, growing up in this community, we have seen Lake Mead's water level deplete throughout our lives. At only about 1,041 feet, the lake sits today at only 27% of its full capacity. If it falls below 1,000 feet, there will not be sufficient water to generate power for the Las Vegas Valley, producing a dire situation for families in our community. Source The causes of this crisis are complex: Nevada has been in moderate to extreme drought for at least the past 22 years, with 2022 being the driest year on records Source. As temperatures and population growth climb simultaneously, the demand for water has outpaced the shrinking outflow from the Colorado River into the Lake Mead basin. If action isn't taken soon to make our desert home sustainable for all, Nevada's population of over 3 million people may face a dire water crisis.
What it does
To help spread awareness about the Lake Mead crisis to Nevadans and beyond, we created a web application that educates visitors on how Lake Mead has fallen due to overconsumption, what actions contribute to its depletion, and what efforts can be taken at a personal and systemic level to conserve water. We created two main views over the course of the hackathon:
- A page with an interactive visual of Lake Mead's water level that rises and falls as the user drags a slider across a timeline from 1935 to present.
- A page where users can select from a menu conservation efforts and consumption habits to see how they affect Lake Mead's water level in real time.
The goal of this website is, above all, to be approachable. The water crisis is a reality that Nevadans face every day with critical impacts for our future; however, the fact is that the average American has so many other personal worries that they may not have the time to fully research what contributes to the water shortage in their community. Thus, our application provides a quick application that educates visitors quickly on an overview of the crisis, along with highlighting the importance of taking personal conservation action and advocating for systemic change.
How we built it
The app is primarily built in Angular.js, with a lightweight backend in Flask to support dynamically fetching the data from a government database on Lake Mead's current water level. The frontend is deployed on Firebase and the backend is deployed on Heroku.
Challenges we ran into
This was our first ever hackathon, so we were initially intimidated by the short timeframe, the competition format, and how far we would be able to push ourselves to make something we're proud of. We were able to tackle this challenge primarily through strong communication, trusting one another, and not being afraid to ask for help. We checked in on one another to make sure we were sharing responsibilities and taking care of ourselves. Also, we prioritized leaving some time to take some boba and Bob Ross breaks! Because of this, we surprised ourselves with just how much energy we had to accomplish our goals within a 24 hour window. Additionally, we faced some technical challenges while working on the application. One team member was entirely new to Angular, and the other had not used it in months. Thus, familiarizing ourselves with the project structure, how to work with one-way and two-way data binding, and how to fetch data from an external API gave us plenty of technical challenges to work through. As an example, we had originally not planned on needing a server-side component to our application, but had to quickly pivot to using Flask when the government website we fetched the depth data from did not allow cross-origin client requests. Additionally, it was difficult to map a correlation between the elevation level and the height of the waves on the main page, as it required dabbling in interpolation. Finally, we struggled with trial and error trying to get the visual elements of the mountains and lake water to lay out correctly using CSS, as working with images and div elements that are not grid-shaped can often be less intuitive than working with standard website layouts. Luckily, throughout our years of studying computer science, we have gained tools to be resourceful and consult open source documentation to iteratively build our knowledge and keep hacking away on the next obstacle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Above all, we are proud of ourselves for making an application that represents and addresses the needs of the Las Vegas community. Ultimately, we believe that technology should be a companion to human growth, and the role of developers should be to seek needs in the world around us and come up with innovative solutions that concretely improve the lives of others. Even if only a few people learn more about the Lake Mead water shortage through our application, their awareness and advocacy could have ripple effects that will inspire further conservation behavior and systemic change within the wider community. As mentioned earlier, we are also proud of how quickly we adapted to and enjoyed the hackathon environment. Instead of thinking of our lack of hackathon experience as a detriment, we reframed it as a reason to be that much more excited about the chance to be here and create something great. Finally, we are proud of how quickly we learned new frameworks and technologies in order to make our solution a reality. From one teammate consulting Angular documentation on the fly to learn the basics in 24 hours, to the other setting up Firebase and Heroku deployments for the first time, we each took away practical, technical knowledge from the development process.
What we learned
- Angular.js and Flask frameworks
- Working with non-standard layouts in HTML and CSS
- Sharing responsibilities and communicate effectively
- Incorporating thinking about how to address social issues with thinking about how to build technological solutions
- Being flexible with our schedules and work outside of our comfort zones in a short deadline
- Presenting data in an approachable, easily understandable manner
- Searching for resources to understand and address technical challenges
What's next for Lake Mead Drought Visualization
While we provided a sample of factors affecting water consumption in Las Vegas and actions being taken to reduce the shortage, there is still much more research that could be done. Thus, an immediate first step would be to update the website with more information as we take the time to understand the water shortage at a more holistic level. If the website were to grow enough, we could potentially reach out to officials from the Southern Nevada Water Association, EPA, or other water-focused organizations for their feedback and added insight on the information our website presents. We could also find more government data sources and/or APIs that could provide the data for more visualizations on the website. Additionally, one feature that we want to add to the website in the future is a more robust system for visualizing how current conservation efforts can help to avoid critical points of shortage going forward. For instance, as users add conservation efforts on the second page of the application, they could see the water level slowly approach an indicator bar that shows when we would be out of drought conditions, when we would have enough water to account for a higher population, and when we would match historical water levels for Lake Mead. This mirrors how climate activists explain the actions we must take to keep global temperatures within a certain threshold; it contextualizes how the efforts we take or neglect to take in the present cascade out into our future. On a technical level, we would also like to polish some aspects of the website's UI, make the display more responsive for mobile devices, and decrease the latency of re-calculating the water height when the selected elevation changes.
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