Jackson County's lo-fi firewatch. Created during Southern Oregon's September 2020 fires.
In September of 2020 I was evacuated from my home, along with the rest of my neighborhood, due to the approach of the Almeda fire. Within a couple hours of the fire’s first spark, I was driving to a friend’s house with my dog, cat, and my most precious belongings.
As the days passed, everyone in my valley were stuck with the same two questions:
- Will we need to evacuate again?
- When can we return to our homes?
I collected a list of Twitter accounts that had timely, well-sourced situation updates, and bookmarked a frequently-updated GIS map of evacuation zones from the county.
Then I realized I could patch it all together on a webpage and stop switching between the same 6 bookmarks every half an hour. I deployed a single link tree-type Github Page with a couple dozen lines of HTML and a few lines of CSS.
After that, I created a second page for those unconcerned about data caps: The actual evacuation map was embedded at the top, with the most recent news tweets listed below it.
Built with HTML, Jekyll, Twitter API, and GIS APIs. It was an interesting time.