The CHERP Mobile App

The CHERP mobile app is the first product from the CHERP research initiative. The app helps educate residents of our partner communities about local hazards, assists with emergency planning, and provides the tools and information residents will need in an emergency.

The mobile app combines information from official community planning documents, hazard risk assessments, and information users provide about their homes and households to identify their hazard exposure and generate personalized emergency preparedness and response plans.

Users can use the mobile app to:

• Learn which hazards are most likely to impact their community

• Determine if their home is located in any identified hazard zones*

• Find out how to receive official warnings and notifications from their communities*

• Find out where to look or listen for up-to-the-moment information from community officials in an emergency

• Locate safe evacuation destinations and the services available at these locations*

• Discover what actions they can take in advance to reduce potential impacts to their home and family

• Generate custom emergency plans based on their home’s location and the needs of household members and pets

Each section of the app is discussed in greater detail below.

* Not all elements are available in all CHERP partner communities. Items marked with an asterisk are only presented if relevant data is available and shared with us by our community partners.

Household Information Tab

The Household Tab is where CHERP collects information about your home, family, pets, and vehicles. The app uses this information to adapt the planning and emergency response information it provides to best match these actions to the unique needs of your household.

It should come as no surprise that the emergency planning and response needs of a young family of six living in a detached home will vary from those of a single retiree with mobility issues living in a third-storey apartment. Most emergency planning checklists provided by governments and NGOs fail to take this reality into account, instead providing overly-general information or spreading their guidance across multiple checklists. CHERP simplifies the planning process by comparing your household’s needs to identify those actions best suited to your family’s situation, whatever that might look like.

The app also uses your home’s location to provide you with a clearer picture of which hazards are most likely to affect your home, based on hazard risk information provided by our community partners. Using the best information available to us, we can provide quick assessments of your home’s hazard exposure for hazards like tsunami, flooding, and landslides where risks can be modelled in advance. This helps reduce any uncertainty and make sure you know exactly which hazards are most critical for planning purposes.

Project Goals

CHERP was initially envisioned with four primary goals for our community partnerships:

1. To better understand hazard preparedness within our partner communities.

2. To help increase household hazard resilience in Canada, especially for coastal hazards.

3. To build and strengthen the ties linking academic researchers, community practitioners, and residents around hazard risk communication.

4. To develop a shared set of planning actions, language, and best practices for household hazard risk communication related to household preparedness and response.

These initial goals were refined through a pair of workshops with our community partners and guests. Our final mission was to come together to help Canadian households to improve their understanding of local hazard risks, develop appropriate emergency plans, and be ready to respond in the event of a hazards-related emergency. This led to the development and refinement of the CHERP mobile app, discussed in more depth in the following sections.