👨🏽‍🚒 Santa Barbara County Evac with Fulcrum Community

Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for flooding and debris flow risk throughout the county. They’ve deployed over 100 volunteers so far to go door-to-door and help residents evacuate safely. In their initial pilot they visited 1,500 residents. With this platform the County can monitor progress in real-time and maximize their resources to the areas that need the most attention.

“This app not only tremendously increase the accountability of our door-to-door notifications but also gave us a real time tracking on the progress of our teams. We believe it also reduced the time it has historically taken to complete such evacuation notices.”

This is exactly what we’re building Community to do: to help enable groups to collaborate and share field information rapidly for coordination, publish information to the public, and gather quantities of data through citizens and volunteers they couldn’t get on their own.

☁️ USGS 3DEP LiDAR Point Clouds Dataset

From Howard Butler is this amazing public dataset of LiDAR data from the USGS 3D Elevation Program. There’s an interactive version here where you can browse what’s available. Using this WebGL-based viewer you can even pan and zoom around in the point clouds. More info here in the open on GitHub.

🏢 US Building Footprints

Microsoft published this dataset of computer-generated building footprints, 125 million in all. Pretty incredible considering how much labor it’d take to produce with manual digitizing.