Google launched Crisis Map eight years ago as a way to visualize emergency and weather-related data. In an email to users, the company announced today that its shutting down the standalone website next month.
Available at google.org/crisismap, the tool provides a “collection of national and regional-scale layers related to weather, hazards, and emergency preparedness and response, mostly for the US.” It shows public alerts like evacuation notices for hurricanes, storm warnings, and earthquakes.
Data was sourced from weather.gov, earthquake.usgs.gov, wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov, and other official agencies. Meanwhile, users could enable layers for tropical storm information, evacuation resources, and storm reports.
Crisis Maps will no longer be available for editing or viewing, which includes maps created by Google. This means, links and embeds for published maps will stop working.
Google is deprecating this standalone website, which has not been visually updated for quite some time, as much of the data is available directly on Google Search and Maps as SOS Alerts:
For example, users searching for more information on active wildfires, tropical storms, floods, and earthquakes can find relevant and authoritative content in the form of our SOS Alerts and Public Alerts. These alerts include emergency phone numbers and websites, maps, translations of useful phrases, donation opportunities, and more.
Organizations that want to visualize hazard locations, temporary shelter, and other crisis-related data are advised to use Google My Maps, Earth, Earth Pro, or Maps Platform.
That data will still be available from whatever sources you used on your map. If you wish to save the information that makes up your maps — e.g. layer names, layer descriptions, data URLs, etc. — we suggest you copy and save those out of the Crisis Map editing interface and save on another platform. See a complete list of Google recommendations above.
Author: Abner Li
Source: 9TO5Google
