Now that we're not scrambling, I want to take a minute to acknowledge all the amazing work that went into getting the disaster check-in site live.
At 4pm on Sunday,
@DCoulbourne found a pocket of internet service and posted an idea to the Verbs discord: A phone number that people affected by Hurricane Helene could send updates to via SMS, and a website that their friends and loved ones could use to check for those updates.
A group of nearly a dozen devs immediately jumped on it. In the middle of a move,
@johnrudolphdrex helped write up tickets, and by 4:30 a landing page was up. By 5:30, basic SMS logging was working. By 6, the first UI was built. At 7, we realized that Twilio approval could take weeks, but 3–4 people were already tapping contacts to see if we could expedite things.
Over the rest of the night, a flurry of PRs came thru putting everything in place, and at 1am I got an email saying that Twilio was trying to expedite the request.
The next morning everyone jumped right back in, and while we were waiting for Twilio we improved the UI and added additional features. Eventually,
@francoxavier33 offered us a pre-approved number for use. The site was live!
Daniel was able to get a local radio station to broadcast the number that evening, and while the team was working to continue to improve the site, 33 people checked in via SMS.
Twilio approved the original phone number — (828) 888-0440 — later that night, and we've been promoting it all today. So far we've had 70 check-ins and ~2,000 unique visitors to the site. People are checking it… now we need to get the number out to as many folks as possible.
Anyway, it was a pretty amazing thing to be a part of.
Thank you so much
@Hanslts,
@gcavanunez,
@ShengSlogar,
@prymiee,
@ProjektGopher,
@MaybeEdward,
@ryanhefner,
@skylerkatz, and all the other volunteers on the Verbs discord whose Twitter handles I don't have. It's so cool to see this number of (relative) strangers work so well to make this happen so quickly!