On Thursday, a press conference was held, attended by the deputy head of the Ministry of Interior and Administration, Maciej Wąsik, and the Chief Commander of the State Fire Service, Andrzej Bartkowiak. At the event, it was announced that the inventory of shelters and the so-called places of temporary hiding, which the State Fire Service has been conducting for the last few months. The Fire Department has released an application for finding shelters. Buildings where citizens can take shelter in case of need are grouped into three categories: shelters (hermetic), places of hiding (non-hermetic) and temporary shelters. The latter are public places, such as schools or garages, where you can hide from harsh weather conditions. Of course, there are the fewest shelters, because 2 thousand (for 300,000 people), there are 9,000 hiding places. (for 1.1 million people), and 224,000 temporary shelter places. (for 47 million people). Therefore, there are more places than Polish citizens. The PSP commander noted that there is 1.5 square meters of space for each citizen.
The Fire Department presents the application “Shelters”. There is still much to improve
Fire brigade released the application “Shelters”, which is to show the nearest shelters, places of hiding and short-term shelter. In theory, it is enough to enter your address (or use automatic location), select the type or types of points that interest us and set the radius in which we want to search for them. A tool in practice Unfortunately, he suffers from numerous childhood problems. Let’s skip the low transparency of the map, which is additionally limited to just over half of the screen. The biggest disadvantage is the inability to search for nearby shelters, which was supposed to be the main advantage of the tool. After entering the address, only a message appears that your search returned no results. Unfortunately, the situation repeats itself regardless of the place and city we check. It is therefore a manual search of the map in order to find individual points. Fortunately, the radius calculation works, but the selection is not smooth and limited to 1 or 2 km.
‘Shelters’ application photo: screenshot from the ‘Shelters’ application (https://strazpozarna.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/nearby/index.html?appid=ec00a2b879424296b6dcc400393c6c1e)
It is also a pity that the application does not display the exact addresses of individual points, but only icons meaning “shelter”, “hidden” and “MDS”, i.e. places of temporary hiding (under one of the icons there is even a legend that helps to decipher the icons). What’s more, There’s even a measuring function which – as you can guess – allows you to check the distance in a straight line. Unfortunately, we will not be able to use because after clicking on the button, only a white screen appears:
The operation of the ruler in the ‘Shelters’ application photo: screenshot from the ‘Shelters’ application (https://strazpozarna.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/nearby/index.html?appid=ec00a2b879424296b6dcc400393c6c1e)
To make matters worse, the “Shelters” app is available disabled in the browser version and on phone screens looks pretty bad. It is a pity that the firefighters did not manage to refine the app and create mobile versions for smartphones with Android and iOS. The tool can be found on the PSP website or
Source: Gazeta
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