A long time ago, there was a fun little website for the DC Metro. That checked if any of the lines, were on fire. That site died years ago. I was hoping that it would someday return, but alas, it never did… So I did it myself.

Introducing IsMetroBurning.com. It does, the exact same thing. Showing a list of the six lines, and putting a flame on any line that report smoke or fire. That’s it.

The Workings

Behind the scenes, it’s pretty simple. About every 15 minutes. A cron job kicks off a script. That script will pull WMATA incidents api, and looks for smoke or fire incident. It saves the results to a json file, and then kicks off a Hugo build. Hugo will look at that json file, and generate the site, based on what’s in it. That’s it.

This was a fun project to pass the time on a three hour train ride today.