Wildfire Ready was developed as a one place, find all application.
Jeff Parr, who is from Dawson Creek, B.C., developed Wildfire Ready, a free bilingual wildfire app that compiles information from several official wildfire sources into one place.
“The idea is to give people a single place to stay informed, ready and able to react fast when fire season hits,” Parr said.
Parr said the app includes information such as road closures, wildfire updates and hotspot data from NASA.
“We pretty much search all the information that people and emergency responders are looking for if a wildfire is to break out, and we compile it all into one spot.”
Parr said the app uses AI agents to monitor official sources for updates and compiles the information on the site.
He said he had been working on the app for the past year and decided to release it after he could not find a similar service.
“We just started this so we could help other people and ourselves,” he said. “We struggled in fire seasons over the years, I grew up in Dawson Creek, my family’s owned land in Northern B.C. for generations, and every fire season I’ve watched friends and family constantly checking in with each other, refreshing different government sites, phoning around, asking is this site down, what are you seeing, what’s actually happening, where the fires are at, what’s going on, whether anyone needed to start packing, nobody knew exactly what was going on in fire country. The information existed, but it was just scattered across too many places.”
Parr said the app is not intended to replace official sources but instead to bring together information already published by those sources.
“We compile what’s already public into one place, and we credit every source,” he said.
The Wildfire Ready app can be found here.
-with files from www.mycowichanvalleynow.com
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