Natural Disaster Dashboard

Inspiration

As a team of five members, we had several ambitious ideas with great concepts involved. As we talked through each one, trying to think of immediate barriers we would run into, we realized we were trying to do too much in just twenty four hours. We needed something effective, useful, and creative. One news story we constantly saw that was affecting people was Hurricane Milton. The idea with the most practicality and impactful on the lives on human beings was our last idea - the Natural Disaster Dashboard.

What it does

The Natural Disaster Dashboard is a All-In-One website that shows quick, necessary information. When evacuating a city, you don't want to spending time researching which hotels are open, where you can get gas, or what direction you are going. Our website, centered around Florida, shows county wide information including hospitals, gas stations, shelters, food pantries, hurricane (or the current natural disaster, path, temperature map) information, evacuation plans, emergency radio channels, recent news, power outages, SOS signal information, and an emergency checklist. We had to keep in mind, sometimes internet access is going to be limited or not available at all. Which is why our website has a feature to download the Emergency PDF immediately to ensure you have information you need, quickly, safely, and reliably.

How we built it

First we discussed several ideas and settled on one - the Natural Disaster Dashboard. We discussed all elements that we wanted to implement and made a shared document to organize this information. Then, we decided who would be responsible for what tasks. Using GitHub, we shared an online repository where updates could be pushed, reliably updating the data. Along the way, we constantly ran into challenges and helped other team members with knowledge we had. If something was completed, a team member took on another task. New to some of the frameworks and APIs we used, a lot of research was done learning how to implement exactly what we wanted.

Challenges we ran into

Dynamically displaying the hotels, hospitals, food pantries, shelters, and gas stations by city was challenging because the data had to be able to update live if necessary. Another issue was the fact no power outage information had a public API to use freely. Instead, a web scraper updates the information for power outages. Sometimes the hotel booking information would have trouble because there is no one website to book any hotel. Instead the link searches the full hotel name and address to always get the correct link showing first. While we fixed most of our problems, within the timeframe we had, we faced some downfalls. We wanted to include an interactive map (of radar or hurricane/weather map) which we could not successfully find (but government or weather agencies could work with a team in the future to implement this information directly).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment we are most proud of is that anyone is free to immediately scroll to the bottom of the website, continue to the GitHub, copy all of the code and change it as necessary. Anyone can use the code in any way they want, to quickly assemble a similar natural disaster site for any area. It also works on any platform, including your phone! This was one foundational belief we all had from the start. The focus was to help people in need, and we have the framework that others may not have the time to make.

What's next for the Natural Disaster Dashboard

When looking at the future of the Natural Disaster Dashboard, there are a few things that we could do to make it even better, helping more people. Government agencies and local officials could directly work with the team to actively update the site. We would also look for government funding or assistance from Google to ensure API calls could update information without any limit and temporary shelter or emergency areas could be linked directly within the site. Additionally, we also show hotel and hospital availability, but hospital information may be generally private. Again working with officials at this time would allow the most effective information to be posted on our dashboard.