Guam Alert Hub
Built for a live storm. Used by thousands within 48 hours.
Verified numbers
- 3,216
- Visitors, first 48 hours
- 5,244
- Visitors, first month
- 21,702
- Page views, first month
- 257
- Community reports, first month
- $0
- Advertising spend
The Bavi storm window
Village-tagged; 182 of them during the 48-hour storm window
Verified numbers only: every figure here has a cited source.
A year-round emergency information and community reporting platform for Guam. It pulls National Weather Service alerts and local agency advisories into one severity-ranked feed, and lets residents report outages, road conditions, and damage from their own villages.
The problem
During a storm, Guam's official information is scattered across agency Facebook pages, radio, and separate utility sites. Residents refresh five sources to answer one question: what is happening near my house right now?
The system
One mobile-first platform that aggregates official alerts, scrapes agency advisories, and adds the missing layer: structured, geolocated reports from residents themselves, verified and moderated before they mislead anyone.
What happened
- Launched into Super Typhoon Bavi (July 2026) and became a live outage map for the island within 48 hours
- Residents filed structured reports across Guam's villages; 86% documented power outages, concentrated where the island actually went dark
- Spread entirely by word of mouth across Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit
- Kept growing after the storm: 5,244 visitors, 21,702 page views, and 257 community reports by the end of July 2026
Dormant until it mattered, then vertical
For days after launch the site sat quiet. The moment Bavi became a threat, residents arrived en masse, and nearly all of the storm's traffic landed in about two days.
That is the signature of real utility: a tool people don't think about until they need it, then reach for instinctively.
Through Jul 3
Near-zero activity
Jul 4
Sharp inflection as the storm approached
Jul 5
Peak day
Jul 6 to 7
Tapering
They came to act
The live map and community reports pages each drew as many visitors as the homepage. People weren't skimming headlines. They were checking conditions and contributing. Nearly five page views per visitor is deep engagement for a news-adjacent site.
| Page | Visitors |
|---|---|
| Home | 2,300 |
| Live Map | 1,200 |
| Community Reports | 1,200 |
| What's Open | 623 |
| Help | 267 |
182 reports built a live outage map
Residents generated information as much as they consumed it. 86% of reports documented power outages, concentrated in the north and central villages: a real-time, ground-level picture of where the island went dark, faster than any single official channel published it.
Five villages accounted for 131 of the 182 reports: a map of where the island needed attention, drawn by the people living it.
| Category | Reports |
|---|---|
| Power | 157 |
| Roads | 15 |
| Water | 7 |
| Flooding | 2 |
| Damage | 1 |
| Village | Reports |
|---|---|
| Dededo | 38 |
| Yigo | 31 |
| Tamuning | 24 |
| Barrigada | 22 |
| Mangilao | 16 |
| All other reports | 51 |
It spread on its own
Residents shared it across Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, or found it on Google. No paid promotion. Organic spread at this speed is the clearest signal that residents found it worth passing on in the middle of a storm.
| Source | Visitors |
|---|---|
| Facebook, all subdomains | 943 |
| 387 | |
| Google search | 155 |
| 137 |
Being straight about the limits
This is a roughly 48-hour snapshot from a single storm, not a sustained-usage record. It proves demand and behavior, not long-term retention.
Community reports are resident-submitted, not official confirmations; GPA, GWA, and the National Weather Service remain the authorities. The platform supplements them; it doesn't replace them.
Reach was social-driven: fast but shallow. Converting one-storm visitors into a returning, prepared audience is the next challenge, and the current focus of development.
Inside the system
- Severity-ranked alert feed (NWS + Guam agency advisories)
- Live storm map with radar and storm track
- Geolocated community reports with village tagging
- “What's open” business status tracker
- FEMA-ready damage documentation
- Admin verification, pinning, and AI-assisted moderation
- Email alert dispatch with one-click unsubscribe
- Phase-aware homepage: Active / Recovery / Calm modes
In the product
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