GovHack 2018 project
Before the fire…
- helps plan survival strategies for the event of a bushfire
- helps encourage preparation by gamification and social media
- helps build community resilience by connecting people and developing survival strategies at the community level
- prompts rehearsal of (and thus familiarity with) then plan During a fire
- helps people to follow their plan and avoid panic
- provides situational awareness by the dynamic updating of escape routes to reflect a changing situation
- provides authorities with live information about who has evacuated
The tool is an R/Shiny web-app. It
- Integrates mapping data from OpenStreetMap with “Last Refuge” data from the CFS. It uses geocoding to determine the location of a user’s address and calculate the three “best” Last Refuges that can be evacuated to, along with the optimal route to get there.
- In the finished product, the process to determine the optimal place to evacuate will include risk data that are a composite of known fire danger (BOM dataset), weather (BOM dataset), topography (OpenStreeMaps dataset), road works (DPTI dataset). Thus, a shorter riskier route would be deprioritized versus a longer safer route.
- The finished product would also use social media to provide notifications to friends/neighbours about actions taken to prepare for (and in the event of) a bushfire.