AGENT
(Claude Hackathon winner)\nCrisis reporting over WhatsApp
The coordinator dashboard. Citizen reports as white dots, official data layered underneath, urgency colour-coded.
PROBLEM
When disasters hit, emergency coordinators work from satellite data while the family watching the fire approach their house sees it first. There's no structured way to get that ground truth to the people making life-or-death decisions. In Valencia in October 2024, flood alerts went out twelve hours after the warning was raised. 223 people died, most of them over 70.
APPROACH
We turned WhatsApp into a crisis reporting tool, because two billion people already use it and there's nothing to install. A citizen sends a message with a photo or location, a Twilio bot collects the missing bits gently, and the report lands on a coordinator dashboard with the urgency already tagged. The dashboard overlays the citizen reports on top of NASA satellite data, flood zones, and weather alerts so coordinators can corroborate or flag discrepancies. Everything exports to CAP XML, GeoJSON, and CSV, the formats real crisis systems already use.
How a WhatsApp message becomes a triaged report. Twilio handles ingress, Flask does the orchestration, the dashboard pulls everything onto one map.
OUTCOME
Built in two and a half hours. Won 2nd place overall out of 430 participants at the Claude x Imperial Spring 2026 Hackathon, and 1st place in the Governance and Collaboration track. The thing I took away: the hard part wasn't the tech, it was the design decision to plug into existing crisis infrastructure rather than try to replace it.
View on GitHubWinner Photo, 2nd place out of 430, 1st in the Governance and Collaboration track. Idea to working build in two and a half hours.