Why we built IncidentWatch
Nearly everything IncidentWatch shows you is already public. The problem was never secrecy — it was that the information is scattered across a dozen places, expires quickly, and takes real effort to assemble at exactly the moment you have no attention to spare.
The problem
If you wanted to understand a developing South Australian incident, you had to hold several things in your head at once: a paging feed for the dispatch, an agency site for the official warning, a Bureau product for the wind change, and a map somewhere else to work out whether any of it was near you. Each source is reasonable on its own. Together they are a research task, and they are at their least usable exactly when the situation is moving fastest.
Worse, most of it is ephemeral. A pager message scrolls away. A warning is replaced by its successor. Once an incident closes, reconstructing what actually happened — which units attended, when, and in what weather — becomes near impossible from public sources.
What we set out to do
Collapse it into one picture
Fuse the paging feeds, the official warning layers and the weather into a single view where one real-world incident reads as one entry, wherever it was reported from.
Make it survive the incident
Keep a durable record — units, timings, severity and the conditions that applied — so the question "what happened that night" has an answer months later.
Be readable under pressure
Design for a phone, at night, one-handed, on poor reception — not for a desk. If it takes concentration to read, it has failed at the only moment that counted.
Stay honest about limits
Show provenance and time, never imply authority we do not have, and never let the product be mistaken for an official alerting system.
The principles we hold to
- Public sources, plainly attributed. We aggregate public paging and official warning products. We do not claim a relationship with any emergency service, because we do not have one.
- Never a substitute for 000. IncidentWatch is situational awareness. It is not an alerting system and it is not a dispatch tool. In an emergency, call 000 (Triple Zero).
- Delay and uncertainty are shown, not hidden. Public feeds can be late, incomplete or wrong. A product that smooths that over is more dangerous than one that shows you the seams.
- Your account is yours. We do not sell the data, and we do not need your location to work.
- Sustainable, not extractive. Small monthly subscriptions fund the pipeline and the hosting. That keeps the incentives pointed at the people reading it rather than at advertisers.
Why it requires an account — even on the free plan
Every page of IncidentWatch, including the free tier, sits behind a sign-in. That is a deliberate decision rather than a sales tactic. The upstream feeds we depend on are rate limited and, in some cases, generously provided; an open, unauthenticated mirror of them would be scraped into the ground within a week and the access would rightly be withdrawn. An account also means we can apply per-user limits, keep your saved views and regions, and answer honestly when someone asks who is reading the data.
A free account costs nothing, needs no card, and takes a moment.
That is the whole idea
One live picture, kept honest, that still tells you the truth a month later. If that is useful to you, the free plan is the place to start.
Create a free account