I built a Red Flag Warning zone-check tool for the East Bay in 48h
Details
- External ID
- 48486484
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a Red Flag Warning zone-check tool for the East Bay in 48h
- Website domain
- redflag-check.info
- Launched
- June 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 17
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7240437158469946
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN. I'm a high schooler in Fremont, CA. Tuesday morning I got a county-wide AC Alert text telling everyone in Alameda County to prepare a go-bag for an East Bay Hills Red Flag Warning that starts tonight at 11 PM. The text went to ~half a million phones.The actual NWS warning polygon only covers East Bay Hills (NWS zone CAZ515). Most people who got the text don't need a go-bag tonight. Some in the hills don't realize how close they are. So I built this tool - https://redflag-check.info/ mit licensed public github - https://github.com/vedant-f-is-ma/redflag-checkIt does a few things - tells people if they are in the flagged zone, and also provides a way to check if a buddy is in flagged zone and send them a text. Everything without installing an app.I heard back from Oakland Firesafe Council director about a gap in my understanding (and the tool). To my surprise, and through feedback, I realized that you cannot assume that only the flagged area is at risk. Adjacent areas are at risk too! Fires do not follow zone boundaries! I fixed the tool.I built this in 48 hours to close that specific gap: type your address, get a yes/no on whether the NWS polygon covers it, your Genasys evacuation zone, tonight's wind + humidity at your point, a plain-English action checklist, a per-school decision view for East Bay districts, and a one-tap iMessage buddy-check template for a hill-neighbor at 10:30 PM.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer infrastructure and monitoring utilities
- Vertical
- Energy & climate
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- fire warning zone checker for east bay
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The project is a client-side or simple backend web tool that compares user coordinates against official National Weather Service GeoJSON warning polygons.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Fires don't respect zone boundaries; warnings need to cover adjacent areas, Uncertainty in predicting fire behavior and wind direction, Lack of awareness about what Red Flag Warnings actually mean
Feature requests: Explain what Red Flag Warning means and preparedness steps, Add address autocomplete with valid addresses
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 42 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 43 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 214 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.