The Problem: When Maps Become Traps
When a disaster hits—like the sudden, severe floods common during India's monsoon season —the fastest route is often the most dangerous. Traditional map applications prioritize speed; in an emergency, the priority shifts entirely to safety. People need more than just directions; they need route guidance that accounts for real-time, hyperlocal environmental conditions.
The challenge is integrating vast, volatile data streams (weather) with static maps (roads) to provide an actionable, safe path.
Introducing SafeSteps: Disaster Route Finder
SafeSteps is a web-based Disaster Route Finder that layers real-time weather alerts onto a map, helping users find safe routes during storms and floods. It is a pure Civic Tech solution bu...
The Problem: When Maps Become Traps
When a disaster hits—like the sudden, severe floods common during India's monsoon season —the fastest route is often the most dangerous. Traditional map applications prioritize speed; in an emergency, the priority shifts entirely to safety. People need more than just directions; they need route guidance that accounts for real-time, hyperlocal environmental conditions.
The challenge is integrating vast, volatile data streams (weather) with static maps (roads) to provide an actionable, safe path.
Introducing SafeSteps: Disaster Route Finder
SafeSteps is a web-based Disaster Route Finder that layers real-time weather alerts onto a map, helping users find safe routes during storms and floods. It is a pure Civic Tech solution built to enhance safety when it matters most.
The core idea: Turn raw weather data into a life-saving overlay.
The Engineering Deep Dive: The Geospatial Data Pipeline
SafeSteps is built on a two-layer API architecture that allows for fast, client-side rendering of complex environmental data:
- The Live Weather Layer: OpenWeatherMap API The first crucial component is fetching accurate, up-to-the-minute weather data:
Data Fetching: We use the OpenWeatherMap API to query conditions (rain, storms, etc.) for a user-specified or automatically detected location.
The Geo-Fencing Challenge: The key technical challenge is translating the API's atmospheric data (e.g., severe rainfall alerts) into geographic zones that represent a flood or storm risk. This requires parsing the JSON response and creating an invisible geofence around the affected areas.
- The Mapping Layer: Leaflet.js Instead of a heavy, complex mapping framework, SafeSteps uses Leaflet.js.
Lightweight Rendering: Leaflet is a small, open-source JavaScript library built for mobile-friendly interactive maps. This was a deliberate choice for accessibility, ensuring the app loads quickly even in remote or low-bandwidth areas (like a BSF Campus in Tripura).
Dynamic Overlays: Leaflet makes it straightforward to plot markers and, crucially, to draw the polygons and colored zones that represent the "unsafe" areas identified by the weather API.
- Route Calculation Heuristics (The Magic) The "Safe Route Guidance" is where the magic happens. While a full shortest-path algorithm (like Dijkstra's) is complex to run client-side for dynamic safety data, SafeSteps uses a powerful heuristic:
Safety Scoring: Every potential road segment is given a safety score.
Alert Proximity: If a segment falls within a predefined radius of the dynamically drawn weather alert zone, its safety score drops to zero, effectively making it impassable on the suggested route.
Visualization: The user's requested route is then calculated, visually avoiding the hazardous areas, providing a clear safe path based on the combined weather and road data.
Building for Impact
The real-world value of integrating these two systems is enormous: it empowers users to make data-driven decisions that protect their safety, using code built entirely on open-source, accessible technology. SafeSteps is a testament to the power of using simple APIs to solve profound social challenges.
Try SafeSteps & Contribute!
I’m currently focused on expanding the geofencing logic to better handle different types of natural disasters (like wildfires or tsunamis). I’d love to hear your thoughts on integrating other open-source routing algorithms!
Live Demo (SafeSteps): https://shalinibhavi525-sudo.github.io/Safe_steps/
GitHub Repo: github.com/shalinibhavi525-sudo
Shambhavi Singh Self-Taught Dev, Gap Year Student, Builder