Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

An American faced with hazardous weather who wants to know whether to evacuate his/her/zir/their house or apartment must first do a web search to find a site that maps flood or evacuation zones, typically A through E. Then the citizen, documented immigrant, temporary protected status migrant, or undocumented migrant must scour various state and county web sites to try to figure out what the latest evacuation orders are by city, county, or state. Here’s part of a story from our local newspaper:

There are many ways for the above process to go wrong. Why not a phone app that gets GPS data from the phone hardware and operating system and does all of the above work reliably? The server just needs to have a database of evacuation and flood zones and a canonical up to date list of evacuation orders. Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?

For Floridians during hurricane season the app could run continuously in the background and send alerts as necessary.

One wrinkle is that people who live in mobile homes are often ordered to evacuate even if they aren’t in a surge-prone zone. The ideal app, therefore, would know about trailer parks and maybe get loaded with a database from Zillow or similar regarding the housing type at a given address.

As an added bonus, a resident of the U.S. could register his/her/zir/their address and phone/email with the server. The server could then put the registrants into a geospatially indexed database and query to find those affected by a newly issued alert and then email/text the relevant subscribers: “If you’re at 1141 George Perry Floyd Memorial Boulevard right now, which you said was your home address, your county has issued an evacuation order covering your neighborhood. Click here for more information, including a list of county-run shelters.” No matter how fast the U.S. population grows via open borders the computational capability of server CPUs should grow yet faster and, therefore, it would never be impractical to issue personalized alerts to every resident of the U.S.

With all of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the federal government on disaster-related projects over the years, why hasn’t something like this been built by the government? Google, Apple, or Amazon could probably build it pretty easily given that those companies already know our addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Maybe they wouldn’t, though, due to fear of liability in case they happen to miss an evacuation order. (Maybe they could be protected from liability as the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers were?)

Here’s a concrete example from Tampa (wiped out in 1848 and hit badly again in 1921), starting with the “evacuation zone map” for Hillsborough County:

The official evacuation order says “Hillsborough County has issued a mandatory evacuation order for Evacuation Zones A and B…”, but the the legend doesn’t mention “zones”. The legend refers to an “evacuation level” of either A or B:

If we look at a satellite view of the city we can see that a lot of people shouldn’t have to run away:

My favorite steakhouse, Bern’s, is in the center of the city and Zone C. Same deal for Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. The art museum, on the other hand, is in Zone A. Need to go to the hijab store in Brandon, Florida (suburban Tampa)? That’s not in any evacuation zone (i.e., the hijab inventory should be safe). The Tampa Zoo, on the other hand, seems to be in Zone A, which is not great news for the animals. Busch Gardens is not in any evacuation zone. The big airport? Zone A.

Separately, here were our neighbors’ Hurricane Milton preparations as of yesterday, which may or may not meet FEMA standards:

Related:

• “NY governor slammed for saying black children don’t know what computers are” (BBC). If Democrats don’t think that Black people can use computers and Democrats run the U.S. (which they do right now), why hasn’t the above-described app already been built and released by FEMA?
• “FEMA Scrambles to Confront Two Storms—and Misinformation” (WSJ): “Instead, federal officials’ efforts to save lives are being complicated by an unusual level of politically charged misinformation, which authorities say risks leading people to disregard evacuation orders…” (the authorities are sure that the problem is that Americans are allowed to speak their minds on Twitter and not that people in a country where IQ is falling might not have the brainpower and diligence to get through the multiple web sites that are required to make an evacuation decision. (If the “authorities” are correct maybe Twitter and Facebook need to be shut down any time that an emergency has been declared? If “misinformation” is killing people and saving lives from COVID-19 justified suspending the First Amendment right to assemble then surely it would make sense to suspend the First Amendment as a hurricane approaches the U.S.)