Crisis Compass

Inspiration

After witnessing the recent wildfires in Los Angeles that affected friends and family, we realized how hard it was to quickly find credible, nearby help during a crisis. We wanted to build a tool that simplifies finding essential resources when you need them most, reducing search time under stress.

What It Does

CrisisCompass connects disaster victims with vital resources through an interactive map. You can locate hospitals, shelters, and food banks based on your current location. It also includes live chat for community support, scoped by city so neighbors can share updates, and a resource page that aggregates important official links.

How We Built It

We built the frontend in React with a typed component layer for pages, filters, and chat UI. We used Google Maps with the React Google Maps Library for map rendering, autocomplete, and nearby search. Supabase handles lightweight, city-scoped real-time chat so the communication stays relevant to your area. Everything is deployed on AWS Amplify for quick, repeatable releases.

Challenges

This was our first hackathon, so organizing roles and integrating everyone's skills was a learning curve. The React Google Maps Library had limited documentation, which made integration harder than expected. We also had to adapt an original HTML and Flask proof-of-concept into idiomatic React components, which took some trial and error.

Accomplishments

We're proud that we delivered and deployed a working app from scratch under time pressure. Our team communication and project management were strong, and we ended up exceeding our own expectations for what we could build in a weekend.

What We Learned

We learned end-to-end software development under pressure: planning, roadmapping, team communication, and adopting new technologies like AWS on the fly. Splitting work into small, testable slices let us work in parallel without blocking each other.

What's Next

We want to add a danger zone API with live notifications, evacuation routes, and highlighted hazard zones overlaid on the map. We also plan to ship a mobile app (probably as a PWA) with the same functionality for offline-first access during outages.