Inspiration
- A lot of wildfires are happening right now and more may happen in the future
- Wildfires can spread very quickly and people may not notice them until it's too late
- The 911 call is limited by the user description as they don't have access to user coordinates and in a big fire, searching for people can be extremely difficult
- With that in mind, my team wanted to build an app that would tell users when should they should start to evacuate and, in the case that they get trapped, would automatically send messages to first responders with the user's current location
What it does
- Allows users to view where wildfires were in the past 24 hours
- When a user is in a dangerous vicinity to a wildfire, the app notifies the user to evacuate
- If the app determines that the user is trapped in a fire, it will immediately send messages to first responders about the user's current location
How we built it
- For the back-end logic we built with Google Cloud Platform using Python.
- The data we get from https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/active_fire/#firms-txt and we get updated data every hour
- For the mobile app front-end we used react native
Challenges we ran into and What we learned
- All of us were new to the technologies we used: no one had ever uses Google Cloud or react native before
- Google Cloud has a steep learning curve and takes a lot of time to do right
- react native requires development configuration for it to work properly. We spent almost a day just to get the Android simulator to work properly
- One team member dropped and we had to change our workflow
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- The proudest achievement is that we have an app that can actually do what we wanted it to do
- Learning react native and how to use it with the native code
- Learning google cloud and how to work more efficiently with it
What's next for Wildfire Watch
- Currently, the emergency notification is via text to one of our mobile devices (for testing, we didn't want to actually call 911), but in the future, a full-fledged implementation would connect straight to emergency services
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