LA Fires Assistant
PolishingAn AI-powered tool that helps Los Angeles County wildfire victims understand what they can legally rebuild on their properties, consolidating fragmented government GIS data from multiple jurisdictions into a single conversational interface.
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About this project
The problem. After the LA County wildfires, homeowners trying to rebuild face a maze of fragmented government data. Figuring out what you can legally rebuild means manually cross-referencing parcel records, zoning codes, overlay districts, and hazard layers across multiple disconnected government systems (Z-NET, GIS-NET, the County Assessor portal, ZIMAS, and city-specific viewers), each with its own interface and quirks.
What it does. This tool collapses that hours-long research process into a single conversational interface. A homeowner or architect enters an address or parcel number, and the assistant routes the query to the correct jurisdiction, pulls the relevant zoning, overlay, and hazard data, and returns it in a structured, human-readable format.
Key capabilities:
- Jurisdiction-aware routing across three jurisdictions (Unincorporated LA County, City of Los Angeles, City of Pasadena) covering 1M+ parcels
- Integration of 15+ government ArcGIS/GIS APIs into one pipeline
- Sub-7-second response times, with caching bringing repeat queries to about 1.5 seconds
- Grouped overlay categorization (Hazards, Historic Preservation, Land Use & Planning, Development Regulations, Community Standards, Environmental Protection)
- Address-to-APN lookup in addition to direct APN/AIN input
- Universal hazard layers (fault zones, liquefaction, landslide, tsunami, coastal) applied across all jurisdictions regardless of local boundaries
Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, OpenRouter (LLM orchestration with primary/fallback redundancy), ArcGIS REST services, deployed on Vercel.