The heavy rains in Chennai have put a lot of creative minds to work. A customisable map of Chennai was created by Arun Ganesh and Aruna Sankaranarayan of MapBox, using an open source mapping tool OpenStreetMap.
The duo developed the map on Friday and within 48 hours of going live, around 420 inundated roads were marked on it. Users can mark inundated areas by zooming in on the particular area on the map and clicking it. Water logged points, subways, tunnels and flyovers can be marked. Further, after requests from people, the flood relief centres have also been marked.
“It is completely crowd sourced where people can map their own neighborhoods. Through this, people can highlight roads that are flooded. We use data sources from NASA and ISRO on elevation profiles of the city and put all of this together in one place,” Mr. Arun said.