My VT Hackathon 2011 Entry: Locating clean water during crisis

This past weekend at the 24 hour long Vermont Hackathon, MyWebGrocer opened up their new grocery store API for about a dozen teams to compete for $10,000. Using open source tools I rolled together a system for times of crisis that text messages citizens on the availability of clean water. I made this in the hopes that when people are stuck without power and clean water they would know when it's worth taking a potentially dangerous trip to the store to fetch clean water.

I built the application using the LAMP stack server architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), the Drupal content management system, the Open Layers module to record users' geolocations, the SMS Framework module to send text messages, and some code I wrote utilizing the MyWebGrocer API to monitor the inventory of water near users' locations. I didn't win anything in the competition but it was a blast to see something like this going down in VT and my exeriences will live on with my upcoming planned work on integrating text message alerts with my Sensor Hub platform for the dontflush.me project in Brooklyn, NY.