Birmingham FireMap
ActiveA live map of fire and emergency dispatch activity across the Birmingham metro, built on scanner audio, geocoding, and a fast tile-based frontend.
Birmingham FireMap started as a way to make sense of the constant stream of scanner traffic from local fire and EMS dispatch — audio that's public, but effectively unreadable unless you're listening live.
A pipeline transcribes scanner audio with Whisper, extracts unit and location information, geocodes the result, and drops it onto a live map. The frontend is intentionally spare: a map, a timeline, and just enough detail to understand what's happening without becoming a scanner-junkie rabbit hole.
The interesting engineering problems have mostly been about noise: transcription errors, ambiguous addresses, and figuring out how to be useful without being alarmist.