Policy

Disclaimer — please read this one

This is not an official earthquake or tsunami warning service. It is an independent map, built for information, that redraws what public agencies have already published. Official warnings come from those agencies — the USGS, India’s National Center for Seismology, and your regional tsunami warning centre.

Never use this page as the sole basis for an evacuation decision. It refreshes every five minutes, it depends on three third-party feeds that can and do fail, and when they fail it says so rather than guessing. In an emergency in India call 112; in Assam, ASDMA’s flood helpline is 1077.

Privacy — what this page does with you

No account, no analytics script, no advertising, no third-party code of any kind. The filters you set, the events you open and the places you pan to never leave your browser.

Your filters and the event you have selected are written into the address bar so a view can be bookmarked and sent to someone. That is the whole mechanism — it is in the URL, visible to you, and stored nowhere else.

No upstream service is contacted by your browser. Every feed is fetched by the server, once, for all readers — which means USGS, EMSC and GDACS learn nothing about you, not even that you exist. The only exceptions are the map tiles, which your browser must request from CARTO for the map to draw at all.

Data, licences and reuse

Earthquake records are the published work of the USGS (public domain), EMSC and its contributing national networks, and GDACS. Basemap tiles are CARTO’s, over OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL — an obligation carried on the map itself, not a courtesy.

What this site adds on top — the cascade rules, the deduplication, the severity banding and the code — you may reuse with attribution. If you reuse it, carry the disclaimer with it.

Accessibility

Colour is never the only carrier of meaning: every severity is also written in words, and the legend names all three. The sheet handle, the filters and the event list are real buttons and links, reachable by keyboard and announced to a screen reader. The one animation on the site — the pulse on a critical event — is switched off for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion.

Known gaps, stated rather than hidden: the map itself is a canvas and cannot be explored without sight — the event list beside it carries the same information in text, and is the accessible path. Very small markers are hard to hit precisely; the hit target is deliberately larger than the dot, but on a dense aftershock sequence they still overlap.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a place named badly, an event missing, a figure that does not match the agency it claims to come from — it should be corrected, and the correction should be visible. Report it in the KsTV Hazard Watch WhatsApp group, which is the same group the flood module uses.

The last three corrections this site made came from exactly that: a reader saying the map looked wrong. Six real earthquakes were being silently swallowed by a deduplication rule that was too coarse; small events across North East India were missing entirely because one catalogue does not carry them; and three modules were showing each other’s data. None of those were found by testing.