It was another great hack weekend at Galvanize in Denver. Hack4Colorado was Colorado’s civic hackday in a nationwide event, http://hackforchange.org. We received a “Best in show” and Second place prize telling us there is confidence in our solution to this problem. It was a bit like winning the popular vote but losing the election. Hack4Colorado continues to be one of the most fun and best organized hackathons. Thank you.

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Our hack was Flood Forecast. The problem: Current notifications and alerts are too broad, message systems are ignored or not timely. Know when to get to higher ground with Flood Forecast realtime text and email alerts. We used FEMA flood zones and current NOAA weather alerts. Written with Angular and PHP using services like Esri maps, forecast.io API, SendGrid and Twilio for alerts.

We didn’t have time to develop a forecast algorithm but it is on the roadmap. The algorithm could look at forestry, topographic and elevation data, fire history and rain forecasts with precipitation intensity and precipitation probability to predict mud slides and floods.

Demo
http://www.floodforecast.org

Code
https://github.com/avantassel/floodforecast

Press
Minor mention in this article

Another 2nd place
https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/esri-climate-resilience-app-challenge-2014

esri-winners

http://www.esri.com/software/landing_pages/climate-app

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