August 1, 2012|By Ben Wolford, Sun Sentinel
South Florida has been without a major hurricane since 2005, but it has no shortage of hurricane apps.
Search "hurricane" in the Apple App Store, and, yes, the University of Miami shows up, and so do at least 75 variations of storm tracking and disaster preparedness mobile software.
On Wednesday, as an Atlantic storm became the fifth tropical depression, the American Red Cross joined the field.
It launched its creatively titled "Hurricane App," the digital Swiss Army knife of disasters, your family's go-to resource when the next Cat 3 bears down. The free iPhone and Android product has emergency checklists, weather updates, shelter locaters â€" even an alarm sound and a flashlight.
"The American Red Cross app looks like it has a lot of promise, but we really can't tell how well it's going to function until we see some alerts," said Trevor Misisco, who owns an Apple consulting firm, Expert MacServices, in Boca Raton [1] .
Misisco also volunteers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he was probably one of the first people Wednesday to download the Red Cross app.
"It's something people can look at real quick on their way to work as they pound down their coffee," he said.
Though the Red Cross app includes creative features â€" such as an "I'm safe" button that blasts a message to worried friends and family â€" the idea isn't new. The storied history of the niche hurricane-app industry goes all the way back to 2008, when Ilene Jones introduced "Hurricane."
"We basically set the bar," said Jones, one of two collaborators with Kitty Code, an Orlando-based app developer.
Kitty Code now has three different Hurricane tracker apps with different capabilities and costs. Its main app is selling at a limited time discounted rate of $2.99. For that, you get push notifications, satellite radar and detailed historic storm data going back to 1851.
"Every app must have some sort of mapping," Jones said. "A lot of them don't, but the good ones do."
The Red Cross app doesn't. But, to be fair, the Red Cross isn't a weather organization; its goal is to help disaster victims. Much of its new app is educational: quizzes and checklists.
Governments are joining the party, too. Palm Beach County [2] has an app, and Broward County [3] has a mobile site.
Palm Beach County [4] designed its free app, PBC DART, to tell users whether they're in evacuation zones and where to go, said Emergency Management Director Bill Johnson. DART and Broward County [5] 's gis.broward.org/mda [6] also let residents submit damage assessments. That crowdsourcing allows them to map the worst-hit areas from the command center.
"We found during Andrew we were blind to what was going on out there," said Charles Lanza, director of Broward County [7] Emergency Management.
That's basically the idea of all the hurricane apps. They tell people what's going on out there.
"Any tool that heightens awareness of the need for hurricane preparedness is a great thing for our community," Red Cross spokesman Stephen Lewis said.
bwolford@tribune.com or 561-243-6602 or Twitter @benwolford
Links
- ^ Boca Raton (www.sun-sentinel.com)
- ^ Palm Beach County (www.sun-sentinel.com)
- ^ Broward County (www.sun-sentinel.com)
- ^ Palm Beach County (www.sun-sentinel.com)
- ^ Broward County (www.sun-sentinel.com)
- ^ gis.broward.org/mda (gis.broward.org)
- ^ Broward County (www.sun-sentinel.com)
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