About

SENTINEL exists to make risk information accessible.

Australia has world-class emergency management agencies and an enormous amount of public risk data. But that data is scattered across dozens of websites in formats most people can't use. SENTINEL pulls it together and makes it readable.

What SENTINEL is

A free website that lets anyone enter an address and see:

• Current emergency conditions affecting that area
• Historical events (fires, floods, storms) that affected the area in the past
• Officially modelled risk overlays (flood extents, bushfire-prone areas, storm surge zones)
• Comparisons between current/upcoming events and historical analogues

Every piece of data is attributed to its source. Every model has a clearly-stated limitation. Every page links back to the agency that produced the underlying information. We don't model new risk. We surface published risk.

What SENTINEL isn't

SENTINEL is not an official source. It is not a substitute for warnings issued by RFS, SES, EMV, QFES, DFES, CFS, TFS, BoM or any other emergency management agency. In an emergency, call 000 and follow official advice.

Why we have ads

Running a continuously-updated public risk service costs money. Server hosting, data ingestion, geocoding services, and the time to keep curated historical event data accurate all add up. We don't accept government funding (yet) and we're not a charity.

To keep SENTINEL free for everyone who needs it, we accept advertising. We're strict about what we'll show:

• No gambling, payday lending, or get-rich-quick schemes
• No political advertising
• No anti-vaccine or other public-health-undermining content
• Sponsored content from aligned partners (insurers, building safety, preparedness suppliers) is preferred over programmatic ads

If you see an ad that violates these principles, tell us — we'll investigate and either tighten the filters or drop the network.

Coming soon: paid options

For people who want to remove ads, save areas for monitoring, build their own events, or upload custom map data, a paid tier is in development. Pricing will be modest — the goal is to keep the public tier funded, not to extract revenue. The free tier will always be free.

Who's behind this

SENTINEL is built by someone with hands-on experience in NSW emergency management who saw the gap between "data that exists" and "data anyone can use" and decided to close it. Editorial responsibility for historical event entries and methodology disclosures rests with the founder. We'll add named editorial contributors as they come on board.

Contact

Found a wrong number? Spotted a missing event? Want to suggest a feature? hello@sentinel.example — we read everything.

Trust

This product depends on accuracy. If we get something wrong, we want to know and we want to fix it visibly. Every page that shows a number cites where it came from. Every modelled overlay shows its limitations. Every historical event entry has a published date and a most-recent-review date.

We'd rather show fewer numbers correctly than more numbers we can't defend.