The Challenge | Don’t Forget the Can Opener!

Create an easy-to-use way for people to develop their own, custom checklists – both items and plans – for specific kinds of disasters. Use NASA images, videos, or data visualizations to illustrate each disaster type, to help people understand how to prepare.

Just In Case!

Providing information and making awareness of natural disasters specifically for their location, allow them to prepare and take precautions to reduce the impact from the disaster.

Motivation

Our motivation for this project is touching a problem that affects a lot of people deeply. So, as aeronautical engineering Master students who belong from countries with many natural disasters, we decided to choose this topic to enhance the people’s awareness about the various natural disasters and allow them to be prepared for the worst. Regardless of not being experts on the topic, but being motivated engineers and well-connected with the technology allowed us to create a mobile application to help people affected by this issue. This aim brought us together under the same roof and we are very enthusiastic to keep developing this in the future. We sincerely believe our idea can affect people at large.

Disasters

After our research, we categorized the natural disaster into 11 categories (according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies).

Earthquakes: They occur when upper layers of the Earth suddenly break and causes to tectonic vibrations. They strike instantly and randomly; hence, they might be extremely mortal. Also, aftershocks may be as catastrophic as the main ones.
Dry mass movements: They are disasters due to the downward movement of soils, rocks, Earth surfaces or debris due to the gravity. Their estimation as independent phenomena is not easy, and this makes these movements dangerous.
Tsunamis: They are series of very long waves with small amplitude because of a sudden displacement of a water mass triggered by tectonic movements of the Earth. They can be very harmful in coastal areas.
Volcanic eruptions: They occur as the release of lava and gas from a volcanic vent. They force wide communities to flee the lava and cause provisional food shortages and volcanic ash landsides.
Drought: It is an insufficiency of rainfall over a long period. It increasingly and stealthily destroys an area over time and may cause famine, epidemics and migrations.
Extreme temperatures: They include heat waves, cold waves, and extreme winter conditions. They can cause wide range of harms since they force thermal limits of human bodies and other organisms.
Wildfires / Urban fires: They are due to uncontrolled massive fires which collapse buildings, forests, fields and infrastructure.
Floods (General and flash): They split in half as general floods, which can be predicted in advance, and flash floods, that are the extreme and sudden counterpart and may blindside people. Also, these results in other disasters such as dam collapse or landslide.
Wet mass movements: They are the downward motions of wet masses (ice, snow, glacier) due to the gravity (e.g. avalanche).
Tropical storms, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons: Although they are thought different by public, they are the same phenomenon named differently in various regions. They are large and closed air circulation systems with low pressure and strong winds.
Storms and tidal waves: They include winter storms, thunderstorms, hail storms, lightnings, tornadoes, local windstorms, sandstorms, which are based on strong vortices of air combined with diverse phenomena; and tidal waves, that are due to strong winds driving sea or ocean water towards the coast. Glacier lake outburst floods can be also included into this category.

Database

Research type of hazards and select the natural ones;
Research each hazard in particular to discover the items needed in case it happens;
Research precautions needed to be taken care of before, during and after the disaster;
Create an excel spreadsheet with all the information accumulated.

Application: JIC

It shows what to put in the emergency kit and additional supplies;
It is linked to the database we created for natural disasters;
The source of the application is on the link: http://appsheet.com/newshortcut/8f9bac5e-c5c3-4d60-a946-a4adf29b0bab
All project files on GitHub: https://github.com/vasuki31/Justincase

Future Improvements

Include more data inputs from the user (family composition, budget);
Automatic location detection of the user and display warning for imminent disaster;
Link to the statistics of continents and further with each countries à Globally;
Add cost and weight budget requirments for the items in the emergency kit bag;
Include various survival techniques (CPR), evacuation plans, shelter maps etc.
Store your trainig and practising data for evacuation and shelter plans and allow it to be shared;
Implement precautions for each disaster type that needs to be taken care of before, during and after the disaster.