Find Fuel During Disasters with Lantern Live App

How to find fuel?

Make sure your personal disaster preparedness plan includes how to quickly find functioning gas stations in your area with help from the Department of Energy’s Lantern Live app.

The app crowdsources the ability to find fuel during an emergency through user-generated status reports of local gas stations. It also allows users to check for power outages in the area, and includes useful tips and guidelines for emergency situations.

Lantern Live uses the power of crowdsourcing and open data in disaster and recovery, and was developed in response to lessons learned from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. It builds on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative, which is designed to accelerate the development of open data for power outages.

Future versions of the app will also include the ability to crowdsource information on the status of gas stations via standardized hashtags for social media. For future releases, the code will also be open source, allowing developers to reuse the code in their own apps, according to the Energy Department. The goal is to encourage new opportunities for other sectors and applications, further leveraging the power of open data.

The Lantern Live app is currently available for Android devices at the Google Play Store.

You can download this and other cool mobile government apps with just a few clicks from our USA.gov Federal Mobile Apps Directory. Federal agencies can get their apps in the directory by using the The Federal Mobile Products Registry.