A new, made in Northern B.C. app is giving British Columbians and Albertans one place to find official wildfire information.
Jeff Parr, a native of Dawson Creek, B.C., has built Wildfire Ready, a free, bilingual wildfire app that compiles wildfire information from a number of official sources, and puts it 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.
According to Parr, the app includes information on things such as road closures, wildfire information, and even information on hotspots 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 works by using AI agents to watch official sources for updates, and compiles it onto the site.
Parr said he’s been working on the app for the past year, and he decided to release it to the public after not being able to find anything similar.
“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 added the app isn’t intended to replace official sources, but just to compile information.
“We compile what’s already public into one place, and we credit every source,” he said.
He added users have been helping shape the app, which has been open in beta form.
In terms of a full launch, Parr said the plan is to launch on May 15.
The Wildfire Ready app can be found here.
