Meet CrowdSource Rescue, a passion project that grew into something much larger.
Matthew Marchetti was among thousands of Houstonians motoring through the turbulent, murky stormwaters of Hurricane Harvey as the sun set on August 27th, 2017. He was sitting in a stranger’s dinky motorboat, attempting to rescue neighbors and shuttle them to safety. The problem was that he didn’t know where to look — neither did the police and fire departments.
“It was a big ol’ mess,” Marchetti says. As he disembarked to high ground, he phoned his friend Nate Larson, and said, “You know, we should develop a little website. Just for our neighborhood.” His idea was to create an application where a family in distress could quickly submit a call for help containing their location and information, which would instantly appear on a map. A responder could pull the location in order to execute the rescue. Once the family was safe, the information would be taken down so rescuers could focus on those still in need.
This idea — the “little website” — would balloon into something much larger.
Marchetti and Larson built a web-based geolocation service that collected data from social media, centralizing and visualizing the calls for help. It became a clearinghouse for volunteers and their boats, who could then be dispatched to help with rescues. As they worked in their company’s office through the night to build the site, the hurricane’s gusts pounded the windows. Water seeped in from above. The power flickered. But they finished, put about 25 people into the system, and went to bed.
When they woke, their service had blown up: there were over 1,000 entries.
Marchetti says. “We’re going to be on the news tonight… ‘Open developer idiot develops a website that doesn’t rescue anybody.’” The site gained traction as it was shared across social media and through word of mouth. As the storm crested, the amount of rescues swelled. At any given time, there were 40,000 to 60,000 people on the website.
At least 25,000 people were rescued in Houston using the app, Marchetti says. High-density rescue locations — such as a nursing home, an apartment building, or a block with multiple potential rescuees — might have been undercounted. For this reason, the number of rescues could be even higher. “It’s kind of hard to pin that number down concretely, but we’re working with a lot of universities going through that data trying to figure it out,” Marchetti says.
The service — now known as CrowdSource Rescue (CSR) — was meant to fill the deficit of public services during a time of immense, dizzying catastrophe. CSR reduced the redundancy created by reposting and sharing across multiple platforms. It crowdsourced every part of the operation: posting, dispatching, rescuing, and updating. It allowed Houstonians and outside volunteer organizations such as the Cajun Navy to work hand in hand with public officials.