SP3-SiteHazards

Haselton Baker Risk Group builds seismic risk software for structural engineers. SP3-SiteHazards answers a question that used to cost an engineer hours of manual work: what natural hazards threaten this specific building site? Type an address, get a report covering liquefaction, landslides, tsunami inundation, fault zones, past-event ShakeMaps, and seismic hazard analysis.

The interesting problem was not the report - it was the data. HB Risk had the hazard information as shapefiles, and the obvious approach was converting them with ogr2ogr per lookup. That works, and it is slow. Digging into their shapefiles turned up the better answer: stand up a PostGIS server, load the hazard data once, and let the database answer spatial questions directly. We worked with their team to get that running, which turned a per-file conversion step into a real query.

The scope was the whole system, built solo: the database modeling, the backend server, authentication, the web API, a CLI tool, the static HTML and assets, and the PDF-generation engine spanning front and back end. Everything was dockerized. The design was ours too.

It was estimated at 250 hours up front and delivered on time, in about four weeks - hand-written, years before AI coding assistants existed.

To be clear about the credit: Rune delivered the prototype. HB Risk took it from there, hardened it, and brought it fully to market. It is a product they sell today under their SP3 platform.