Flood Master

Flood Master's logo.
Flood Master's splash screen.
Flood Master provides an interactive map to help visualize the user's location and nearby evacuation areas.
Flood Master calculating longitude and latitude based on location.
Flood Master calculating longitude and latitude based on current location.

Inspiration:

In her neighborhood in Rio Del Mar, Santa Cruz, one of our team members, Erin, personally went through the effects of the recent heavy flooding in early January. After seeing the damage to her community that she calls home, she wanted a platform that would have helped her family and friends during the hectic evacuation process. Wanting to make a difference after her experience, we decided to create an app that would benefit coastal communities and others in flood-risk areas.

What it does:

Flood Master helps individuals in flood-risk regions to determine the most secure evacuation sites based on elevation levels. The app takes in the user’s inputted location and then outputs local establishments within a 6 mile radius. This allows individuals to be prepared for immediate flood evacuations as floods can be disastrous within a short period of time.

How we built it

The project was built on the platform Flutter, which uses the programming language Dart. We used Google APIs, such as maps, elevation levels, and geocoding. The maps API helped us get the user’s current location. The geocoding API converts the user’s location which is given as an address to a geographical location (latitude and longitude).

Challenges we ran into:

Challenges we ran into include trouble implementing the data we got from the APIs into our app, learning how to program in Dart and utilizing Flutter and Android Studio (a new language and programs for our whole team), and connecting the front-end to the back-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of getting the Google APIs and learning how to utilize them, figuring out how to code a splash page, and learning how to make an app. None of us have ever developed an app before and we were able to make something completely new with a language and platform that we had no prior experience with.

What we learned

Over the course of this project, our team learned how to develop an app for the first time, through the platform Flutter. Moreover, we learned more about APIs and how to implement the data into our application.

What's next for Flood Master

With more time to implement our ideas, we would like to consider improving the app by adding a weather API to alert the user (send a notification) when there is an active flood warning/heavy rainfall, as well as identifying the elevation levels for the local establishments, to see which is the best place to evacuate to.