EmergencyWalletCards.com

 UPDATE: EWC has been briefly featured on the Hacker News homepage. Thanks for all the love! If you haven’t seen the post, please check it out – lots of great discussions!

A few years ago I started looking into emergency preparation for my family. It was quite the foreshadowing, as the pandemic had not yet begun. At the time, I wanted some clear, simple guidance on basic things everyone should have prepped and ready-to-go in case of any emergency. It was not long until I came across FEMA’s excellent guides at ready.gov.

In addition to the standard necessities one might expect to find on the easy-to-follow checklists – extra batteries, can opener, water – I found an item I never thought of but yet seemed quite obvious and important : a portable hard-copy of useful information in case of an emergency.

Ready.gov provided a PDF of a “card” which one could fill out and carry in their wallet. It focused on sharing emergency plans with everyone in the family that can be readily accessed by simply reaching for your wallet. But there were also sections that provided information useful to first-reponders and other emergency workers which particularly caught my eye – medical conditions, parent and school contact info for kids. It was a great idea. I thought everyone should have one on them at all times, right beside their ID and credit card.

screenshot of the FEMA PDF

I printed out a few copies and sent them out to my family to fill out. The result was great. There were issues with legibility since the cards were so small, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. I started thinking of ways to improve and extend the FEMA PDF. And so, EmergencyWalletCards.com (hereafter affectionally referred to as EWC) was born.

EmergencyWalletCards.com is a website I built with the help of my old friend Paramdeo to help bring Emergency Wallet Cards to everyone by making it super easy for anyone to quickly fill, print and fold a card for their wallet, purse, or anywhere you can slip a credit-card into.

picture of the EWC logo

Privacy is important to EWC, so none of your information ever leaves your browser.

EWC hates ads as well, and will never need to show you one of those annoying GDPR cookie banners, simply because it will never track you.

Transparency is also important to EWC, so all code is available for free to everyone.

And finally, you are always free to fill as much or as little information as you wish on your EWC.

screenshot of the EWC information form

In the future, I’d like to see EWC become even more useful and would love if everyone could lend a hand.

If you’re interested in all the technical details, give the code a look.

Share your thoughts and ideas in the Twitter post below (and maybe a like and retweet as well). And remember: be ready before the next emergency.