Tornado Shelter Alert App

At Hack OKState, our team set out to design a project that would make a genuine impact on our community. The event’s theme, “Local Impact: Create solutions that directly improve our campus, city, or community,” challenged us to think about real problems Oklahomans face every year. Living in a state that experiences some of the highest tornado frequencies in the nation, we knew exactly where to focus our efforts. We wanted to create something that could help people stay safe when every second counts. That idea became the foundation for our project, the Tornado Shelter Alert App. Our Tornado Shelter Alert App is a mobile application built with React Native that helps Oklahoma residents and visitors quickly locate the nearest tornado shelters during severe weather. The app combines real-time weather monitoring, dynamic mapping, and intelligent navigation to guide users to safety during tornado emergencies. Unlike traditional weather or map apps, our design emphasizes immediate, critical information. Users can see their current tornado risk displayed as a clear percentage on the main screen, supported by a color-coded system. Green for low risk, yellow for moderate, and red for high. This visual approach ensures that even in moments of panic, users can understand the situation instantly. The app’s database includes over 60+ verified shelters across Oklahoma, featuring 30 OSU campus shelters and 36 community shelters in major cities such as Tulsa, Enid, Lawton, and Bartlesville. Each shelter entry includes exact addresses and coordinates. Using geolocation and distance calculations, the app automatically sorts shelters by proximity, allowing users to identify the safest nearby options quickly. With a single tap, users can open navigation directly in Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze to start heading toward safety.

A live, interactive map gives users a clear picture of their surroundings, displaying nearby shelters and a 5-mile “danger radius.” A real-time weather panel provides additional data like wind speed, gusts, and atmospheric pressure, along with timestamps so users can trust the freshness of the data. What makes our project unique is how it blends technology with purpose. We didn’t just want to build an app that looks good, we wanted to build one that could save lives. We prioritized accessibility, simplicity, and reliability. The app is designed for real-world use, with an interface that remains readable and functional even under stress. Our color-coding system was inspired by emergency signage principles fast, intuitive, and impossible to misinterpret. The app’s local focus also sets it apart. Every data point, every shelter location, and every risk calculation were built with Oklahoma in mind. It’s not a nationwide database or a generic weather app, it’s a safety tool made specifically for our community. We built the app in React Native using the Expo framework, which enabled us to produce a cross-platform application that runs on both iOS and Android within the 24-hour hackathon window. Our main technical components included: Real-time Weather
Data using Meteomatic API, Mapping Integration using Google API Key for Map SDK, and Animated UI. Managing location updates, weather data, and map rendering simultaneously was one of our biggest technical challenges, but by carefully handling our render processes, we achieved a smooth and responsive experience. This project gave every member of our team valuable learning experiences. For some of us, it was our first time developing a mobile app. We learned how to integrate multiple APIs in real time and explored new territory in geospatial programming, learning how to calculate distances between GPS coordinates and how to visualize danger zones effectively. Working under hackathon pressure helped us grow in rapid prototyping, team collaboration, and creative problem-solving. Just as importantly, we learned about user experience design for emergencies. Building an app for people under stress means reducing every action to as few taps as possible. These lessons reshaped how we think about design in general. The Tornado Shelter Alert App is more than just a hackathon project. It’s a real, usable tool that could directly benefit Oklahoma communities. Our shelter database uses real, verified locations, not placeholders or mock data, and our navigation integration allows people to act immediately during a tornado warning by sending a real-time notification alert. We see this as a starting point for a larger vision: a community-driven emergency safety app that could expand across the state. In the future, we’d like to integrate push notifications for severe weather alerts and predictive analytics that anticipate tornado formation. These additions would make the app an even more powerful resource for public safety.