Surface Water Data Portal
Demo snapshot · July 28, 2026 at 4:53 PM PT · not current conditions
Alerts
Choose the creeks you care about and the level that matters to you, and get an email or a text when a gauge crosses it. 32 gauges publish numbered thresholds, and every one of them can be watched.
Valley Water's current notification system sends text messages only. There is no email option, and a subscriber manages the list by texting keywords to a phone number. This build treats email and text as equal channels, keeps the preferences on a page a person can read, and lets someone follow a single creek instead of everything at once.
Both messages below are composed from a real gauge and a real threshold description in this corpus. Nothing in an alert is written by hand at send time.
Text message
VALLEY WATER: Stevens Creek above CA-85 near Central Ave has reached threshold 2, 16.5 ft, at 2:15 a.m. What floods at this level: stoa.works/scv/g/5035 Reply STOP to end.
A text is a doorway, not a document. It carries the gauge, the level, the time and one link.
Stevens Creek above CA-85 near Central Ave reached threshold 2
At 2:15 a.m. this gauge read 16.5 feet, which is threshold 2 of 4 published for it.
Overflow at Moffett Blvd returning back to Creek. Creek overtops Evelyn Ave and Central Expwy moving westward.
Valley Water, threshold 2 description for Stevens Creek above CA-85 near Central Ave
This is Valley Water's own description of what floods at this level, quoted exactly. It is not a forecast, and it is not an evacuation order. For an emergency, call 911.
Every email carries the unsubscribe link and the link to change which creeks you follow.
This is a working copy, so the form above validates and echoes your choices back and sends nothing. In production the subscription list, the messaging account and the delivery record are the vendor's to run, which is what the scope of work asks for.
What that means concretely: alerts are triggered by a measured crossing of a published threshold, never by a person deciding something looks bad. Every send is logged with the reading that caused it, so an after-action review can reconstruct exactly who was told what and when. Delivery failures are surfaced rather than silently dropped, because a bounced address in November is a person with no warning in February.
An alert from this system means a sensor crossed a number. It is not a prediction, it is not an instruction, and it does not know where you are standing. Emergency instructions come from your city, your county, and the fire department. For an emergency, call 911.
Readings on this working copy were captured July 28, 2026 at 4:53 PM PT.