S
Show HN
Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)
After reading "During Helene, I Just Wanted a Plain Text Website" on Sparkbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734) , I built safe-now.live – a text-first emergency info site for USA and Canada. No JavaScript, no images, under 10KB. Pulls live FEMA disasters, NWS alerts, weather, and local resources. This is my first live website ever so looking for critical feedback on the website. Please feel free to look around.

https://safe-now.live

It appears the site couldn't handle HN traffic or maybe the site owner took it down. Regardless, a project like this needs a lot of thought put into it to be something that people can rely on during times of crisis.

If it can't handle a surge in traffic from HN, it won't be able to handle a surge during natural disasters.

The site is light enough to handle traffic spikes from HN. The site was being patched based on feedback here. You should see it up and running.
Works for me 10 minutes after your post. I'm happy to be part of the unintended load test.
It's working for me after 16 minutes of your comment & someone else mentions how it works after 10 minutes of your comment.
The font size is too small for emergencies on mobile devices. You need to consider that users might be in a panic, may not have both hands free to zoom in, and their vision could be impaired by smoke or other factors.
It is astonishing how one's motor skills degrade when the adrenaline is flowing. I once tried to dial 911 on an iPhone in such circumstances. My hands were shaking so badly I kept dialing 922, 811, 914, and so on. Terrible in the moment but a very good lesson for preparedness. I really appreciate the "dial Emergency" methods on modern phone software that just need a button held down.
My only complaint with hold-to-dial emergency dialing is phones with damaged or glitchy buttons (ghost presses) that trigger it accidentally. There's probably a setting to disable it, though I think its manufacturer-dependent.
Imagine trying to navigate Hacker News in an emergency. LOL!
I can actually imagine this when AWS goes down and you have to go check if AWS is down again. (Although it's not a type of medical emergency but still) xD

Though to be fair, If your prod depends on AWS and it goes down, you might be going through tons of adrenaline too as well.

Thank you. This has been patched.
  • ·
  • 3 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Others have mentioned this but looks like fires from close to ~20 years ago are still showing up as "active emergencies"[0]. Shows the Nash Ranch fire as an active emergency but it was declared in 2008.

[0]: https://safe-now.live/c/us/co/colorado-springs/

Thank you. This is fixed.
AI didn't know we are not interested in 20 year old fires.
  • ohashi
  • ·
  • 21 minutes ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I've been working on a similar idea for travelers, https://travelsafetydata.com/

It's pulling the travel advisories from US/CA/UK/IE/AU/NZ and aggregating the results/information to help you understand the risks of different countries. It also pulls from other sources for basic country info/risks (eg. women, lgbtq).

Yours is way lighter weight and focused, very cool!

This is really useful! I'm planning on making a list of websites that work well with Lynx and other text based browser, specifically because people should be able to access important information regardless of how powerful their computer is
I love this kind of thing - I'm always building lists and reference things, but IME people generally don't gravitate towards things like this.

That said, I really want a backcountry version of this. I live in Tahoe and our relationship to incoming storms (lightning) is pretty different than those in the Rockies. Plus bears and other predators (how to behave). Etc.

I once wanted to do something similar w/r/t tap water and drinkability.

Fun/neat.

This is an interesting idea, but the very first page I looked at was wrong (current weather in Alameda county shows as 72* - it's almost 30* below that here, and the daily high in the warmest areas is projected to be 65).

Next I looked at San Francisco, and oddly it listed a bunch of minor earthquakes in San Ramon - none of which are listed in Alameda county, which is actually next to (and parts of which actually felt) those tremors.

The about page [0] links to a github repository [1], but it seems to not be uploaded or hidden.

[0]: https://safe-now.live/about

[1]: https://github.com/venkatag/SafeNow

I appreciate the idea, but as others have mentioned it seems like for something like this to be useful it really needs to be well thought out and tolerant to extreme spikes in traffic.

I might be wrong here but it looked like the responses from the server are chunked, which I _think_ precludes the use of a highly optimized cache response e.g. from a CDN. Assuming that's true (very open to correction of course!) I wonder why this would be.

Such a page has both dynamic and static information in it. If you don't have Internet access, that static info can still be helpful. A QR code can hold 2.9 MB of data. I'm imagining a QR code that contains the static information, and a small script that checks for connection and then redirects to the full page that also has the dynamic info. A QR code on an eink screen that gets remotely updated over LoRA could even include the dynamic info.
I'm seeing fires from 1999.

https://safe-now.live/c/us/al/

  • cush
  • ·
  • 2 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Well technically the agent did “build a website of the latest emergencies in every county”… it just so happens Alabama rarely has forest fires.
Yeah, it goes back to 2021 for California for a list of 15 fires or so - and we have 120 current ones, so probably not a good explanation.
Thank you. This has been patched.
I would suggest increasing font-size, looks too small
I disagree. When I saw the page, I thought, "Finally an information dense page again! It's been so long since they've been common and I miss them."
I disagree with your disagreement, for example HN is readable but the linked site feels too small for my eyes on a 21.5" 1080p monitor. It also doesn't respect browser preferences, unless you enforce a minimum font size (which can break display elements on other sites):

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 13px;
If the dev wanted a similar effect by default but be more accommodating, they could do:

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 0.8125rem;
There's no reason why you couldn't have smaller font while still respecting browser scaling. However, they might also want to just leave it at 1 rem and let the folks that prefer higher information density to customize their own browser settings, since those are what most well developed sites should respect and it might be more accessible by default on most devices (for my eyes, at the very least).

As for targeting specific screen sizes for non-standard font scaling, media queries also would help!

In regards to missing information dense pages, try changing your browser font settings, it might actually be quite pleasant for you to see many sites respecting that preference!

I agree that too many sites now will narrow the text area and pad too much. The issue here is a fixed pixel size that will look quite different depending on the specific monitor setup you have.

And honestly if this type of thing bothers you as much as it does me, unfortunately it means adding a bunch of stylus sheets everywhere...

  • ·
  • 4 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I think the default target is expecting a smaller screen mobile device, hence the 13px default. This is a good idea, and any other screen sizes that see smaller text can still zoom in using default browser behaviors.
Agree, even just converting to use em instead of px is more usable on differing screen size/dpi
Yup. Even on mobile the text is too small for me. In particular, the line-height could be larger so links can be tapped more easily.

Nice though, I like it.

This has been patched. Thank you.
The UK emergency phone number is 999, not 112.

Ugh. Don't make a website like this without verifying the information is correct please!

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/999-and-112-the-uks-national-eme...

112 is also a national emergency number.

Normally I would say this doesn't matter much, but I wonder if a shorter domain name (or just one without a dash in it) might be in order here. I don't think I would want to be typing or remebering "safe-now.live" in an emergency
It would be good for the specific state/province/city pages to include the same info from the ancestor pages so you only have to link to and load one page for your area.
You need an AI angle if you want investment and up-boats.

Suggest a LLM-based chat that consumes feeds and provides a terrification-score rating letting you know how to calibrate your panic-levels, based on real data. Allow for real-time questions on how to purify water, if it's better to carry gold or ammo etc

Good luck. I'll give you 80 mil based on a 40% stake with voting rights.

It must be able to cache it's all content in browser.

I guess to do it it properly you need to make it PWA.

  • Croak
  • ·
  • 3 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
You can also just use proper HTTP cache headers. ETag and a very long Expires header.
Idea is to keep it light and accessible. PWA would be data heavy. The use case is in the article linked in the post description.
  • cush
  • ·
  • 2 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I think people would be more interested in the heavy emergencies, not just the ultra light ones
You are correct. This has been patched.
Nice touch to have it bilingual in Canada.

Maybe add Spanish?

Seeing how it hasn't survived the HN hug of death... Not sure how you've built it but consider putting it behind a CDN or something and caching the responses, esp since you're trying to pull live data
Local news needs timestamps… I see stale last-week weather news. Had to click and see date from last week in the article.
>Flood: Higher ground - Turn around, don't drown

It's hard to take a 14 year old serious ...

In Texas we lose people every year because they think they can make it across what looks like a small, shallow creek and are swept away by water that is really much deeper. You might think, “Well, those are stupid Texans,” but we even have EMS personnel die that way. A couple years ago we lost a deputy sheriff who was patrolling and trying to monitor water levels. Her car got swept away and then pinned downstream and she drowned. “Turn around, don’t drown,” is a mantra here.
When you drill down to active emergencies for a local area there's a ton of stuff there but it's all old. Why display it if the purpose of the site is current emergency info?
This has been patched. Thank you.
Are there any fema declared disasters you believe are omitted?
I think they are referring to the occurrence rate of false positives, not that of false negatives. E.g. the page for California lists back through to the Bond Fire, which was contained in 2020. The problem may stem from that the FEMA page lists the incident as a single day https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5385 so this tool doesn't set and end date like it would for https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5382

A similar kind of noise note could probably be made of the "Recent Earthquakes" section. E.g. if you select Indianapolis, IN it includes all the way down to a M2.6 which occurred in NW Tennessee 30 days ago.

great stuff!!

wish there was sth lk this this side of the pond

... for North America.
> for North America

Correct? Straight from the text: "a text-first emergency info site for USA and Canada"

Looks nice & useful. However, I'd make two versions: The one you have, and additionally a version with Javascript that is a Progressive Web App (PWA). I'm pretty sure some AI could convert the normal page into a PWA for you.

The PWA has the advantage that it will also load when the internet is down and there is no need to save the page manually.

How can it load when the internet is down?!? Doesn’t the PWA source have to be fetched? And if it’s cached, then so can be the static resources.
The complete web page and all resources are saved locally by the service worker. "Clear site data"/clear cookies will delete it. However, clearing the normal browser cache won't. It's overall a little more persistent than the cache for static resources. However, it needs to be installed as an app to really work offline without initial loading. Chrome will prompt you for that on Android, Linux, and Windows. Safari can also do that but makes you jump through hoops. In Firefox, the PWA will work like a page that loads even when the machine is offline.