Gulfcoastspill.com Launches to Help with the British Petroleum Oil Spill Recovery

MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a new website, gulfcoastspill.com is available to help people find and share spill information. Gulfcoastspill.com’s main function is to collect images, videos and reports from people impacted by the spill and to make them available to the public. For example, people can upload images of oil on beaches, injured wildlife, volunteer activities and much, much more. The goal of the project is to speed recovery by crowd sourcing information and making this information readily available to recovery teams. Gulfcoastspill.com’s technology is open sourced and the data is available to anyone. San Diego State University’s Immersive Visualization Center, also known as the Viz Lab, will be storing the images and data and ensuring that it is open to the public.

“Community generated information has the ability to shape the response to the spill”

Gulfcoastspill.com is being developed and maintained by the Gulf Coast Spill Coalition, Inc., a newly formed charitable organization, that has brought together technology and web design experts, educators, legal and business professionals and ordinary individuals who want to help with the crisis. Gulfcoastspill.com was launched with the combined efforts EdgeCase (edgecase.com), a leading Ruby on Rails software development firm, whose team built the website; Intridea (Intridea.com), a technology firm that developed the mobile reporting application Oilreporter (oilreporter.org); and Engine Yard (engineyard.com), a cloud computing and hosting firm that generously donated their servers and disk space.

Gulfcoastspill.com will allow individuals in the impacted areas to easily share photographs and videos of the spill damage. “Community generated information has the ability to shape the response to the spill,” stated Paul Berger, co-founder of the Gulf Coast Spill Coalition, Inc. “By sharing information on Gulfcoastspill.com people help their entire community and the recovery process as a whole,” he continued. Gulfcoastspill.com’s data will likely be used by emergency responders, wildlife organizations, educational institutions and volunteer groups to assist in the recovery.”

In addition to gathering and displaying reports, Gulfcoastspill.com will also provide information on the spill, and recovery tools such as a business income loss calculator. “Over the coming weeks, we will be adding more and more functionality to the website,” stated Joe O’Brien, who led EdgeCase’s development of the website. “There are numerous ways web and mobile technology can help the recovery, from sharing images and location of damaged wildlife to helping businesses calculate their financial loss. The site that was launched today is just the first version of what we believe will grow and become a dynamic and powerful recovery tool. We hope that people will visit the site frequently to find the latest features and tools.”

About the Gulf Coast Spill Coalition

The Gulf Coast Spill Coalition, Inc., is a newly created charitable organization formed in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Our mission is to help people share spill information by maintaining gulfcoastspill.com. We believe that by better facilitating information sharing, we can help the response efforts and create a historical archive of the spill. Our headquarters are located in Coral Springs, FL.