The hurricane app that keeps working when the power and the signal don’t.

Live: https://blackoutbox.micahberkley.com

Track 01 - Four Forces, One City. Forces: water (storm surge, king tides) and fire (extreme heat during outages). People we serve: seniors living alone, people on insulin and refrigerated medicine, parents with baby formula, Spanish and Haitian Creole speakers, families in evacuation zones A-E.

The problem

After a hurricane, Miami can lose power for days in 90 °F heat. Nobody can tell you whether the food in the fridge or the insulin pen in the drawer is still safe, and the apps that could tell you stop working when the internet does.

What it does

1. Before the storm: snap your fridge, your freezer and your medicine. Save your evacuation zone, nearest shelters, hospitals and open pharmacies, and local emergency numbers onto the phone.
2. When the power goes out: tap “The power just went out.” Every item gets its own live countdown: SAFE, USE NOW, DISCARD, PAST LABEL LIMIT. Food clocks come from the USDA / FoodSafety.gov power-outage rules; medicine clocks come from each drug’s FDA label on openFDA. Every card quotes its source.
3. Works offline. It’s an installable PWA. After one visit, the saved box and every clock keep running with no network. “Blackout mode” turns the whole app true-black when the connection drops.
4. Now: live NWS alerts, National Hurricane Center storms, heat index, UV, air quality, the Virginia Key tide with king-tide flags, your evacuation zone, and the closest FEMA shelter with directions.
5. Map: all 2,147 Miami-Dade evacuation-zone polygons, 2,736 flooding and drainage 311 requests as a heatmap, and a flood slider that floods the city by real ground elevation (USGS 3DEP). “Play the storm” raises the water from tonight’s high tide through a 6 ft surge while the camera flies to Miami Beach.
6. Ask: questions answered from the saved box in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. If someone mentions a downed wire, gas smell, chest pain or trouble breathing, the answer starts with “Call 911.”

How AI and data are used

• A vision model (Gemini Flash through Cloudflare AI Gateway) turns a photo into an item list in about 3 seconds.
• The math is never AI. An open-source rules engine (64 tests) decides every countdown and cites the FDA or USDA rule it used.
• Claude answers questions; Gemma 4 (open weights, on Workers AI) translates to Spanish and Haitian Creole.
• Every image in the app was generated with Grok Imagine.
• Open-source AI entry: the blackout-box Agent Skill in skills/blackout-box/ follows the Agent Skills open standard and runs the countdown engine with no model at all.

28 public data sources

openFDA drug labels and recalls, FDA emergency insulin guidance, USDA FoodKeeper, FoodSafety.gov, NWS observations, forecasts and alerts, National Hurricane Center, NOAA Tides & Currents (Virginia Key), FEMA Shelter System, OpenFEMA declarations, Miami-Dade Open Data (evacuation zones, hospitals, open pharmacies, libraries, fire stations, 311), Open-Meteo, AWS Terrain Tiles / USGS 3DEP, OpenFreeMap / OpenStreetMap, Florida Statute 252.358, plus Census, EIA and CDC sources for the Why tab. All cited in the README.

Safety

Information from FDA, USDA, NWS, FEMA and Miami-Dade sources; not medical advice. It never tells anyone to change a dose. In an emergency, call 911.

Built solo at Hack for Humanity: Miami, October 10, 2026. MIT license.