Company
Date Published
Author
Kyle Kelly-Yahner
Word count
699
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The residents of Friendswood, Texas, came together with city officials to recover from Hurricane Harvey's devastating flooding in 2017. The City's Emergency Department was stretched thin, but neighbors and residents volunteered to help, including a local software engineer named Joshua Lyman who built a Twilio-powered prototype for a disaster dispatch hotline. The hotline helped direct volunteers and citizens to assistance efforts, with over 200 homes mucked out during the recovery process. Even after the water rescues were complete, the City asked Joshua to keep the call center live as a precautionary measure.