How RedAlertDirect works

What we monitor, how often, what each date means, how levels are set, and what we cannot tell you. If something here does not match what the site shows, that is a bug — tell us at hello@conjora.ie.

Sources

Events (placed on the map, each with its own page):

• GDACS (UN OCHA / European Commission) — earthquakes, tropical cyclones, floods, volcanoes, droughts and wildfires. We take Orange and Red alerts only. gdacs.org
• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program — the USGS "significant earthquakes" feed, with its PAGER impact estimate. Where GDACS reports the same earthquake we show one entry citing both. earthquake.usgs.gov
• ReliefWeb disasters (UN OCHA) — current disasters and humanitarian emergencies listed by UN OCHA. Used only when our ReliefWeb API access is configured; the source status table shows whether it is.

Monitored situations — conflicts and protracted crises that no free, structured, authoritative feed publishes as events: Sudan war, Russia–Ukraine war, Gaza and Israel, Myanmar conflict, Eastern DR Congo conflict, Haiti crisis, Central Sahel crisis, Yemen crisis, Syria crisis, Somalia crisis, Afghanistan humanitarian crisis. For each we hold only stable facts of record (name, countries, start date where there is one, one sentence of background) and links to the UN OCHA, ReliefWeb and UNHCR pages that publish current figures. We do not hold casualty or displacement figures, because figures typed into a website go out of date silently.

Reports (dated developments, shown under events and situations): UN News, ReliefWeb updates, BBC News, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, France 24. UN News and ReliefWeb are labelled Official; the others News. We show each publisher's own headline and summary line, with its publication time, and link to the original. A report is attached to a situation when it names the place and (for news sources) carries crisis context; to a disaster event when it names the hazard and an affected country within the event's dates. Reports older than 30 days are not added.

Not used: social media, anonymous sources, GDELT (a machine-coded index of news) and language models. No part of an event, its location, dates, level or summary is generated by AI.

How often

All sources are polled every 30 minutes. Pages are rebuilt after each poll. This is continuous monitoring, not real-time: a development appears here after the source publishes it and our next poll picks it up — typically well under an hour, longer if the source publishes late or is unreachable. The source status table shows when each source was last checked and whether it answered.

What each date means

• Source updated — when the source last changed its record (or, for a situation, the publication time of the newest matched report). Freshness colours use this date only.
• Event start — when the source says the event began.
• Last checked — when we last polled the source and found the record still listed. Polling does not make information newer.
• Last change ingested — when we last stored a material change (level, countries, severity statement, status).

All times are UTC. Information older than 14 days is drawn faded on the map and flagged on its page.

When events appear and disappear

• An event appears when its source lists it at Orange/Red level (GDACS) or as significant (USGS).
• It is marked ended only when its source, polled successfully, no longer lists it as current. A failed poll never ends anything. Earthquakes are treated as active for 7 days (14 if PAGER is orange or red).
• Ended events leave the map and the search index, stay readable for anyone with the link for 90 days, then are removed.
• A monitored situation is active when it has at least one matched dated report in the last 14 days, otherwise monitoring.

Levels — and why there are no scores

We used to show a 0–100 "AI severity score". It could not be justified: it was a model's guess from a handful of headlines. It is gone. Levels now come from one of three places, and every page says which:

• Source — the issuing body's own published alert, mapped one-to-one. GDACS levels combine hazard strength with exposed population and vulnerability; USGS PAGER estimates likely fatalities and economic losses. Both are models, and both are revised as information arrives.
• Editorial — conflicts and protracted crises have no comparable public alert scale, so they are Not rated unless a person has written and dated an assessment with sources. Such an assessment is labelled as analysis and lapses after 90 days unless reviewed again.
• Not rated — we will not assign a level automatically where nothing objective supports one.

Each event page also lists the factors a reader would weigh — hazard severity, geographic spread, escalation, civilian impact, displacement, infrastructure, economic impact, international involvement and uncertainty — each with a rating and its basis: Source, Rule on source data (e.g. number of affected countries the source lists; whether the source has raised its alert), or Not assessed. For situations we show reporting activity (dated reports in the last 7 days) — a measure of attention, explicitly not of events on the ground.

Facts, reports and analysis

Event pages separate three kinds of information: what the source confirms (structured fields from GDACS, USGS or ReliefWeb, or the stable record for a situation); what has been reported (news headlines, not independently verified by us, attributed to the publisher); and assessment (the level and factor ratings above, labelled as rule-based or editorial). Where reports conflict, the source record takes precedence and the conflict is left visible rather than resolved by us.

Alerts

Subscribers get at most one email a day, and only if, since the last email, a source has reported:

• a new GDACS Orange/Red event, or a USGS earthquake with PAGER orange/red;
• an escalation — the source raised its alert level;
• a geographic expansion — the source added affected countries;
• a new humanitarian emergency listed by ReliefWeb (when configured).

Nothing else triggers an email — not news volume, not keywords. A quiet day sends nothing.

Limitations

• Coverage is what the sources cover. Situations outside our monitored list appear only through official UN/ReliefWeb reports, not as events on the map.
• Report matching is by place and hazard names. It can attach an unrelated story that names the place, and miss one that does not.
• Situation markers sit at a country centre, not at the location of any incident.
• Early impact estimates (first 48 hours) are routinely revised by their sources.
• This is not a warning service. For tsunami, storm and evacuation warnings use your national authority; for travel, your government's foreign-affairs advice.

Corrections

If a page misstates its source, email hello@conjora.ie with the page link. We fix the pipeline rather than patching the page.