Is there a burn ban in Portland, Oregon right now?

We recently got a new fire pit for our backyard, and I wanted to see if there was a burn ban in Portland so we could use it. Thankfully, Multnomah County has a great page that they update daily with the burn ban status, as well as other fire safety information: https://www.multco.us/health/staying-healthy/wood-burning-restrictions

However! I wanted something a little simpler, just a page that tells me if there’s a burn ban or not, along with an API endpoint that I can use in a little weather app I was building.

I’ve used Netlify for a few projects recently and had been meaning to check out their serverless functions (which I think are AWS Lambda functions in a wrapper).

Using Cheerio to scrape the Multnomah County site, I made this little page that displays ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ depending on if there’s a burn ban: Based on previous updates it just looks for the phrase ‘mandatory burn ban’ in the main content node (#node-37292).

Is this foolproof? No! But it’s just for fun. It’s possible i’ll add more logic, but for now it works alright.

You can check out the page here: https://portlandburnban.creinhardt.com
Source code available here: https://github.com/cjreinhardt/PortlandBurnBan

Cheers!