I am now the point of contact for downtown Vancouver in the French community's emergency network, and it drives me nuts that most people I talk to have no emergency kit at home and basically no water.
People are shocked, or in denial, when I mention that it could take weeks to restore electricity and that they will have to rely on their own food and water for at least several days.
So I decided to build a public-facing site that compiles existing information, as a way to lay out the facts and help convince people, instead of hearing back that "the army will come" or that "there are emergency food reserves" (there aren't).
I see this as a citizen initiative, with one main message: go buy some water and canned food, it's your civic duty.
I relied on AI agents to compile the information, which is spread across hundreds of reports. With different levels of validation, plus my own review, I am confident the information is reliable, even if some details may not be fully up to date. The process took 2–3 weeks, alongside work, a toddler and a baby!
I'm posting it here because: 1) I'm curious to get feedback and suggestions. 2) Many HN readers are on the West Coast or in other seismic areas, so even if you're not in Vancouver, the general recommendations may be of interest. Be smart: buy some food and water.
Cheers
Thomas
mattm•36m ago
- It's obviously AI created
- There's way too much text
Visuals tell a story faster and leave a bigger impact than a wall of text. Is there a way you could turn some of the most important messages into visuals? For example, "it could take weeks to restore electricity" - having a calendar view or animation of this with perhaps comparable situations that happened elsewhere.
For food and water, show pictures of what someone should have on hand for a family of 4.
Your main message is go buy water and canned food but that doesn't appear until 3/4 of the way down the page. Research kits that people can buy at their favourite local stores or online and have a clear call to action for people to buy one of them now. If someone visits and leaves the page by buying a kit without reading any of the information, that's going to help them way more than reading and absorbing all the info but without buying a kit. If there's no good kits that you think are worth buying, that could be a good business opportunity. Make your own and sell that.
The sources take up way too much space. That section could be made much smaller.