Fire Up wins Rep. Judy Chu’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 28th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Fire Up, Anika Jha said, “The spark was personal. During the Palisades Fire, my family prepared to evacuate as smoke rolled in and alerts conflicted. Friends packed hurriedly, roads clogged, and it felt like we were guessing under pressure. That night, I promised myself I would build a tool that gives people clarity when it matters most.

“I started reading incident reports, after-action reviews, and papers on fire behavior, fuels, and meteorology. I explored NASA and NOAA portals, county GIS layers, and emergency routing APIs. I realized the core problem was not a lack of data but fragmentation. Great datasets exist, yet they are scattered across systems, each with different formats and timescales, and rarely presented for public decision-making. I wanted to bridge that gap by combining prediction, detection, and routing in a single, human-centered app.

“I also wanted ordinary households to participate in resilience. The Detection Hub came from asking how a student, neighborhood group, or school could contribute a signal before a satellite pass. A Raspberry Pi, a webcam, and a lightweight CNN became a practical way to crowd-extend early awareness.

“The project reflects how I see engineering: empathy first, then systems design, then rigorous implementation. I kept asking, ‘What would have helped my family last time?’ That question shaped the color encodings on the map, the way tooltips explain risk, the caching design that respects refresh intent, and the immediate callouts to contacts and shelters.

“I am inspired by the idea that a student can knit together spaceborne data, local sensors, and machine learning to protect communities. Fire Up is my answer to the helplessness I felt that week. It proves that if we unify data and design around real people, we can move from fear to foresight. That belief, plus the determination to keep improving with every season, is why I built it and why I will keep building.”