Poway Neighborhood Emergency Corps
A modern preparedness platform for the Poway Neighborhood Emergency Corps. Today's local risk, a preparedness assistant, an interactive neighborhood map, and a site volunteers can keep current themselves.
A preparedness platform
Poway can actually use
We rebuilt the PNEC site into a working platform. Residents see today's risk for Poway, ask a chatbot anything they're unsure about, find their block and coordinator on a map, and volunteers can edit any page themselves without writing code.
- Aneesh Deevi
- Ethan Patel
- Samarth Vaka
What this means for Poway
Ready before they ask
Residents see Poway's wildfire, flood, and heat risk the moment the page loads. Anything else, they ask the chatbot.
Connected to their block
Every household can find its coordinator, nearest fire station, and evacuation route on one map.
Owned by the corps
Volunteers update the site themselves. Hosting is free. Easy to extend when PNEC needs something new.
What Poway gets now
Find Your Neighborhood
A map of every Poway neighborhood. Click one and you get the block coordinator, the nearest fire station, and the evacuation route for that area.
Find a neighborhood →
Helper Bot
A chatbot that answers prep questions like what goes in a 72-hour kit or how to evacuate. It pulls from PNEC's own FAQs so the answers stay accurate.
Ask it a question →
Risk Watch
Wildfire, flood, and extreme heat risk for Poway, shown on the homepage. Pulls from live weather and AQI data. No login, no download.
See it live →
Member accounts and roles
Accounts for residents, volunteers, and admins, each with their own dashboard. PNEC can actually run things from the site, not just publish to it.
See the member portal →
Edit and publish in minutes
Volunteers can edit any page from the browser. The editor uses AI to turn a plain request like "change this date" into the actual code change, then commits it. No coder needed to push an event update.
See the editor →
For the next team taking over PNEC
1. What was done
Everything below is on the live site right now. Look at the code before you touch it.
- Risk Watch. Pulls wildfire, flood, and heat risk for Poway from Open-Meteo plus an AQI feed. Cached for 30 min so we don't hammer the APIs.
- Helper Bot. Gemini chatbot, proxied through the Flask backend so the API key stays off the frontend. Uses PNEC's actual FAQ data as context.
- Find Your Neighborhood. Leaflet map with all 60+ Poway neighborhoods. Each one shows a coordinator, the nearest fire station, and evac guidance.
- Member accounts. Four roles: resident, coordinator, staff, admin. Login uses session cookies and bearer tokens, with IP-level rate limiting and lockout after failed attempts.
- Live Theme Editor. Lets approved volunteers edit Jekyll pages from the browser. Groq turns their request into the edit, then the backend commits it to the frontend repo using the GitHub API.
2. What was said Feedback from the CTE Expo and N@tM
- Add wind to Risk Watch. Right now it shows fire, flood, and heat. Santa Ana wind events are a big deal in Poway and should be on the panel too.
- Lock down the chatbot. Audit Helper Bot for prompt injection and data leaks. It shouldn't be able to reveal internal info or make up emergency advice.
- Address lookup for Find Your Neighborhood. Right now people have to know which neighborhood they're in. Let them type an address and have the page jump straight to the right block and coordinator.
- Coordinator email. Coordinators need to actually email the residents on their block, not just see a contact card.
- Mobile Device accessibility. The ability to run the website and have proper aspect ratios on a mobile device such as an IPhone would improve the website.
- Improve Live Theme Editor. An easier to use theme editor would be an improvement for the website.
- Neighborhood Coordinators. More options for them and things that they can do that would improve their role in PNEC as a neighborhood coordinator role.
3. What needs to come next
Ready for Poway
