Call for Code – Developer competition that seeks solutions for natural disasters
Oof. I&#x27;ve got some training and experience in disaster management, including being a part of the overhead team for the Camp Fire last year through my county&#x27;s search and rescue team.<p>The things they&#x27;re advertising here just aren&#x27;t the things that disaster teams need. Nobody on a natural disaster has ever said, &quot;you know what would make this so much easier? ...Blockchain.&quot;<p>The only part of the Camp Fire that would satisfy a tech boner would&#x27;ve been Alameda County&#x27;s drone team. It turns out that they&#x27;ve been fostering a pretty good drone team and they were able to do flyovers of large sections of the disaster area, capturing imagery down to 1cm resolution and piping it back to a mobile GIS center that looked straight out of an episode of CSI. Their work was good enough to satisfy the requirements for a lot of insurance adjusters who would ordinarily have had to physically visit the site. It could&#x27;ve sped up the entire search and recovery operation by several days if it weren&#x27;t for CalFire&#x27;s insistence on redoing all of it with pen and paper.<p>The number one technological need for disaster work is communications, hands down. One of the first pieces of infrastructure that falls apart during a major disaster is communications, and it&#x27;s also the most urgent tech problem to solve, every time, because you <i>can&#x27;t</i> have teams out in a disaster area with bad comms. We really need some kind of reliable, fast-deploying, low-maintenance radio and cellular infrastructure, and nobody&#x27;s figured that out yet.<p>Probably the next big pain point is GIS or data management. Our current GIS software is good enough in the hands of skilled operators, but getting data into and out of it is labor intensive and its dataviz isn&#x27;t exactly cutting edge. A mobile app that interfaced well with it and allowed search teams to bring up a search segment with a limited amount of data through a text message or QR code would be badass.<p>On the data management side, every single event, item of interest, and squawk of radio traffic has to be logged. Every single one. For a big disaster, this turns into reams and reams of dense paperwork and hundreds of man-hours to compile it all. And when teams arrive at IC in the morning, they have to fill out information cards and receive printed packets every single time, because there&#x27;s no state-level coordinated database of DSWs and no way to quickly organize them by skillsets. This slows down deployment by around 2 hours in the hands of a top-of-the-line management team, and by much more when the incident management team is less experienced.<p>If you&#x27;re seriously interested in pursuing any of this, feel free to contact me at the email address in my profile.<p>We&#x27;ve already started inter-agency training events for this year&#x27;s next wildland-urban-interface fire.