Inspiration
During natural disasters, it's hard to find information pertaining to the situation. You need shelter, food, resources, medical help, places to avoid and directions. But getting this information isn't easy, news channels only tell you to visit their website and find the labyrinth of links and ads to find something. Our site is different.
What it does
The website uses your current location and displays the immediate forecast in your area. If it's severe, you'll immediately be notified with an alert banner to seek shelter. The FindAShelter page shows you all the shelters around you with the distance, name, address, and contact information. The site also shows you other pertinent information such as amenities available at a specific shelter including food, water, clothes, medical care and more. It also shows you an overlay of the accuweather radar on the map to show you where some roads may be inaccessible due to the disaster based on possible flood levels. The site also provides tips you can use to further prepare in the event of any other disasters.
How we built it
For the frontend, we uses Bootstrap to provide a clean user interface that scales with any devices, whether if it is a desktop, tablet, or phone. The frontend calls the accuweather api to provide immediate information and it is displayed using a combination of javascript and jquery. The backend of the site uses Google Cloud Platforms. PHP is used to retrieve information of shelters in the area and google maps api is used to populate the map view with the shelters.
Challenges we ran into
Being able to store and use the queried data and updating it. Error handling. Map overlay + radar.
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