How Community Alerts Work in Blaze Sentry
Blaze Sentry has two halves. The app is where incidents get reported by the people who can actually see them. The Sentry Dashboard is where teams monitor those reports, triage them, and coordinate a response. Understanding the handoff between the two is the key to using either one well.
What Gets Reported
Community members can report and track multiple hazard types:
- Severe weather: Tornado sightings, thunderstorm damage, and extreme heat conditions.
- Flooding: Flash flood observations, rising water levels, and coastal storm surge impacts.
- Seismic activity: Felt earthquakes and observed damage.
- Fires: Active fires, smoke conditions, and evacuation situations.
How Severity Is Assigned
Every report carries one of three severity levels, and they mean the same thing in the app and the dashboard:
- High: Immediate threat to populated areas. Take action now.
- Medium: Active event with potential to affect communities.
- Low: Event observed but currently contained or limited in impact.
Severity is a judgment about urgency, not size. A small fire beside an evacuation route can warrant a higher rating than a larger one burning in open country.
What Teams Do With It
The dashboard is built for situational awareness and coordination:
- Monitor live activity: Active alerts, high-severity counts, and recent reports in the Overview.
- Filter and triage: Search and filter by severity, type, date, and status in the Alerts view.
- See incidents geographically: Filter by severity, type, and region in the Map view.
- Analyze trends: Totals, severity mix, resolution trends, and CSV export from Reports.
- Tune notifications: Email alerts, high-severity-only mode, daily digest, weekly report, and team updates.
Why Both Halves Matter
Automated detection is broad but coarse; it will tell you a region is affected. Community reports are narrow but precise; they tell you which street is impassable. Neither is sufficient on its own, and the gap between them is where most bad decisions during an emergency get made.