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Junior Design course · May – Aug 2024

During a flood the bottleneck usually isn't supplies. It's knowing who to send where.

A real-time coordination platform for disaster relief: live flood tracking, forecast views, geolocation-based alert routing, and an admin dashboard tying reports of need to available volunteers and resources.

FirebaseJavaScriptGeolocationReal-time DBHTML/CSS
Real-time
Firebase-backed live flood tracking and alerts
Geolocation
Alerts routed by proximity, not manual triage
Dashboard
Single operational view of incidents and dispatch
Forecast
Forward-looking view alongside current conditions
The problem

Relief efforts rarely fail for lack of willingness. They fail on latency.

Volunteers, supplies, and reports of need all exist during a flood — usually in three separate places, moving at the speed of phone calls. A report that waits an hour in an inbox is a household that waited an hour longer.

  • Manual triage doesn't scale. Once a disaster crosses more than a few neighbourhoods, a human reading incoming reports becomes the bottleneck.
  • Knowing where the need is isn't enough. Without a workflow matching need to available volunteers and supplies, a map of problems is just a map of problems.
  • Nobody learns software mid-crisis. Anything that needs explaining will be abandoned for a phone call the moment things get busy.
The approach

From incoming report to dispatched volunteer, with no manual handoff.

01

Incident intake

Reports of need enter through the web app with location attached.

02

Live flood tracking

A Firebase real-time layer keeps current conditions and affected areas in sync across every connected client.

03

Geolocation routing

Alerts route by proximity so the nearest available response is notified first, with no manual triage step.

04

Resource allocation

Available supplies are matched against reported need through a structured workflow.

05

Dispatch & dashboard

Volunteers are assigned to tasks and locations, with one admin view of active incidents and dispatch state.

Results

What the platform does — and where it stands.

COORDINATION

The triage step disappears

Geolocation-based routing removes the human bottleneck between a report arriving and the nearest responder hearing about it.

REAL-TIME

Everyone sees the same state

Firebase keeps flood conditions, incidents, and dispatch status synchronised live across every connected client — no refreshing, no conflicting copies.

OPERATIONS

Resource allocation as a data workflow

Supply matching and volunteer dispatch are structured pipelines rather than a contact form, which is what makes the coordination view meaningful.

SCOPE

A course project, honestly scoped

Built for the Junior Design course as a functional prototype. It demonstrates the routing and dispatch architecture end to end; it has not been operationally deployed with a relief organisation.

Note on assets

Screenshots to add.

The repository ships the application pages — index.html, flood-tracking.html, forecast.html, and admin-dashboard.html — rather than exported screenshots. Run it with your Firebase config and capture each view into assets/img/flood/ to drop them into this page.

Built with
JavaScriptFirebaseFirestoreHTMLCSSGit