In the run-up to Hurricane Irene, I created two evacuation maps for the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth. I loaded the storm surge files into Fusion Tables and used a little JavaScript and Google Map’s geocoder to allow people to search by their address to see whether they lived in a storm surge area.

One of the biggest challenges in this was the sheer size of the files — the state provided me all four storm surge levels for more than 20 cities and counties in one shapefile. It was absolutely enormous — more than 100 MB even when zipped. I used QGIS to isolate each storm Category level as a separate file, and then deleted all the cities and counties we didn’t need. I simplified the files with QGIS as best I could without losing detail. Each step took about a half hour because of the size of the file; I’ll admit to crashing QGIS more than a few times.

Even then, the amazingly detailed files made it nearly impossible to create a  map that would be deployable.  Originally I had planned for a regionwide storm surge map, but after creating it in both Fusion Tables and in Flash through MaPublisher, the load times were so slow that no reader would stick around for the map to draw. So I chopped it up by city and kept it to surge levels for Category 1+2 storms, which ended up being most useful anyway, as those were the evacuation zones.

The Norfolk map, in particular, was hugely popular with our readers, getting more than 50,000 hits in a single day.

Here it is.

Here’s the best of what I’ve seen so far, though:

• Eloquent JavaScript
• Code Academy
• Nathan’s Lessons

I’ve been playing around with all three of these trying to get a better handle on JavaScript before I plunge into JQuery and put it to use on maps and such.