Standard Response
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Standard Response won six prizes at Cal Hacks 13.0, the most of any team. Read how we built it and see the Cal Hacks 13.0 winners with the most prizes.
When a disaster forces people out of their homes, Standard Response calls every household in the evacuation zone at the same time. It learns who needs help, who can help, and where they are, then routes neighbors and first responders to the people who need them most.
A simulated night over the real map of west Altadena. Standard Response has called every home inside the warning zone (white outline) while the fire (top right) moves in. The 1,003 red homes are the ones dispatch has to reach.
On a simulated replay of the real Eaton Fire night, with the same 25 vans on both sides:
| Households out in time |
|---|
| Today's process: residents have to reach 911 themselves | 39 of 662 (6%) |
| Standard Response: the agent calls every home | 641 of 662 (97%) |
Anthony and Justin
On the night the Eaton Fire started in January 2025, Anthony Mitchell, 68, was at home in west Altadena with his son Justin, 35. Anthony used a wheelchair. Justin had cerebral palsy and could not move on his own; it took two or three people to lift him. The evacuation order for their part of town came at 3:25 a.m., with no warning before it. Anthony called 911 at 6:03 and again at 6:14. The dispatcher told him "They're on their way." Nobody came, and both men died in their home.
LA County's paratransit service, AccessLA, said its vans were ready by 4 a.m. Nobody called it. (Sources: LAist's July 2025 investigation of the 911 recordings, NPR and AP.)
Thousands like them
From wildfires to hurricanes, the people who die are mostly the ones who can't leave on their own:
| Disaster | Deaths | Who died |
|---|
| LA County fires (2025) | 30 | Mostly older, many disabled. The 17 Eaton victims counted early on averaged 77 years old |
| Lahaina, Maui (2023) | 102 | More than two-thirds were in their 60s or older |
| Camp Fire, Paradise (2018) | 85 | A majority were over 65 |
| Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana (2005) | 971 | Almost half were 75 or older |
A UN survey of about 6,000 people with disabilities found that 80% could not evacuate right away without difficulty. Disability registries were supposed to close this gap. During Hurricane Harvey, fewer than 5% of the people on Texas's registry were contacted, because nobody had the staff to call through the list in time.
What firefighters told us
During Cal Hacks, on October 24, we took the idea to two Palo Alto fire stations: University Park (Station 1) and Station 6, which covers Stanford. We spoke with about six firefighters, including a station captain. They told us the vehicles are rarely the hard part. The hard part is finding out who needs help, and then spending a small number of crews and vehicles where they matter most.
In a large disaster, dispatch is the bottleneck. "We have four dispatchers that sit in the room," a firefighter at Station 1 said. "You can only answer so many calls." Thousands of calls arrive at once, and the people who can't get out alone wait in the same queue as everyone else, if they get through at all.
An AI voice agent can hold thousands of phone calls at the same time, each in the caller's own language. That's why we built Standard Response.
How it works
1. Call every home and build a census
A dispatcher draws the warning zone on the rescue map, or our public Apify Actor starts the calls when a California county moves a zone to warning. The agent then calls every home inside the zone at once.
Each call fills in one row of a census of the zone:
- Who needs help. The agent confirms where the person is and whether everyone can leave. It asks how many people are there and what help they need, then reads the answers back so the resident can correct them. Life threats jump to the top of the call floor.
- Who can help. The agent calls a resident's named helper first, such as a relative or a neighbor who agreed to pick them up. Then it asks the nearest neighbor whose home the fire reaches no later than the resident's; for that neighbor, driving over means driving away from the fire. When nobody like that can go, it asks the nearest driver anyway.
- Where they are. Every answer lands on the rescue map as a colored home: red needs a ride, orange can help, green has left.
Silence never counts as safe. An unanswered home is called again at 2 and 5 minutes, then texted, then put on the list of doors for field crews to knock on.
Before any disaster, the Ready check collects the same facts ahead of time. The agent calls each household in an agency's area, or the household signs up at /ready on its own phone. It records who lives there, what help they'd need getting out, and which room that person sleeps in.
In the pitch we play a test call we made with Roseland, a teammate's grandmother.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
