Who runs it
One person: Stacy Willis, who lives in Imperial Beach. This site is not run by an agency, a non-profit, a government body or anybody's campaign, and no organization named on it has paid to be here.
My day job is marketing and website management, at a local business called Peakuilibrium. That is why the site exists in this form — compiling and maintaining information is the skill I had to offer a problem I care about. The work is pro bono and done in my own time. Why I made this has the longer version.
How it is put together
Everything on this site is a summary of public sources: government reports, agency updates, scientific research, and news coverage. I use AI to help pull information from these sources and organize it into maps, charts, and plain-language explanations. I review and edit everything before it's published, and I check facts and figures against the original sources.
Every page shows when it was last updated, and the map links each item to its sources. The date changes only when the content has been reviewed, not every time the site is rebuilt.
How statuses are judged
- What people experience
- A symptom of problems further upstream, like beach closures.
- No plan yet
- No funded or formally proposed fix could be found in public records.
- Proposed, not funded
- A fix has been designed, studied, or proposed, but the money to build it isn't committed.
- Funded or underway
- Money is committed, or design or construction has started.
- Done
- Completed, according to the responsible agency.
- Status unclear
- Public reporting is missing or conflicting.
These are my judgments based on the most recent public reporting. Conditions change quickly, so check the linked sources for the latest.
Numbers that update on their own
Most of this site is written by hand and changes when I change it. A few numbers are different: they are read straight from the agency that publishes them, and they refresh without me touching anything. River flow at the border is the first of these.
That saves the numbers going stale, but it also means a machine is putting figures on the page without me seeing each one first. So there are rules about what it is allowed to say.
- It never decides whether anywhere is safe. It shows what the agency published, in the agency's own words, and links to them. San Diego County decides whether a beach is closed, not this site.
- Every reading carries the time it was taken, in local time, so you can see for yourself how current it is.
- Old readings say they are old. If a source stops responding, the card tells you when the last reading was taken and sends you to the official page. It never quietly shows yesterday's number as though it were today's.
- "We don't know" is a real answer. If the weather station isn't reporting rainfall, the card says it can't tell you — rather than saying no rain fell, which is a different thing and one people act on.
- Beach status links out rather than being copied. The County publishes advisories, warnings and closures on sdbeachinfo.com. I could copy those onto this site, but any copy can be wrong or behind, and this is the one thing people most need to be right. So this site points you at the County's own page instead. I've asked the County whether there's a feed they'd prefer I use.
Where this stands today: the river flow reading is built and being tested, and is not on the pages yet. This section describes how it will behave when it goes live, and will say so plainly once it does.
Corrections
If you spot something wrong or out of date, I want to know. Send a correction.
Please note
This site is independent. It isn't affiliated with any government agency or with the organizations it lists. It isn't medical or legal advice. For current beach closures and air quality alerts, the San Diego County sources linked on this site are the authority.