WatchKat is the emergency operations centre platform for counties, cities and agencies — one shared command picture covering incidents, FEMA community lifelines, ICS forms and org chart, mapping, resource requests and public alerting. Self-hosted, on your infrastructure, with a tamper-evident record of everything that happened.
Built by SARAem LLC · Deployed on your servers · No per-incident pricing
The problem
Most emergency operations still run on a spreadsheet, a whiteboard and a group text. The record is reconstructed afterwards from memory. WatchKat is built so the documentation is a by-product of doing the work.
Incident status, lifelines, resources, assignments and the activity log all reference the same incident. Change something on one screen and every other position sees it live.
Every entry is timestamped and attributed. Corrections are amendments — the original is preserved and marked superseded, so the log holds up in an after-action review or a public-records request.
Installs on your own server. No cloud tenancy, no data leaving your jurisdiction, and licences that verify entirely offline — the software never phones home.
Capabilities
Screens below are the live product — not mock-ups.
Track every lifeline component with a status, an impact statement and an estimated restoration time. Roll-ups drive the dashboard so command sees stabilisation at a glance rather than reading a list.
Plot command posts, shelters and staging areas; draw evacuation zones and road closures. Features are stored as real geometry in PostGIS, so a zone can answer which points fall inside it.
Assign the standard ICS positions by section — Command, Operations, Planning, Logistics and Finance/Admin. Assignment picks from your directory, so the org chart and the contact list stay the same set of people.
Typed inventory with an enforced status lifecycle, and a request queue where every approval, denial and fulfilment carries a reason back to the person who asked.
Draft, content-approve, then release. The server enforces the separation: the person who drafts cannot approve, and the approver cannot release. Released alerts emit standards compliant CAP 1.2 for onward distribution.
The log is always on screen and always attributed. Status changes, assignments, requests and decisions all land in it automatically, alongside what your staff type.
Security & accountability
Public agencies get audited. WatchKat is designed so the answers already exist.
Every administrative action is written to an append-only, SHA-256 hash-chained log. A built-in verifier proves the chain has not been altered.
Six role tiers plus granular capability grants, scoped globally or to a single incident, with an approval queue for new accounts.
Argon2id password hashing, breached-password screening, account lockout, session control and TOTP multi-factor with an enforceable policy.
Live and Training run side by side in the same install. Exercise data can never reach a live incident — the server blocks it at the write.
Full incident export for public-records requests, a data-classification banner across the apps, and legal-hold marking.
Stream the audit log to your existing SIEM over syslog in CEF or RFC 5424 for continuous monitoring.
Built to WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 intent: keyboard navigation, screen-reader labelling, a high-contrast theme and colour-blind-safe status.
Licences are Ed25519-signed and verified entirely offline. No licence server, no phone-home, no outbound dependency.
More screens
The administration platform is a separate site, so day-to-day EOC staff never see it.
Deployment
A single server binary with PostgreSQL. No container platform to adopt, no cloud account to open, no per-seat metering.
Runs as a Windows service with a control application for start, stop and status. Ships with an SBOM for supply-chain review.
A single static binary plus PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Runs under systemd behind whichever reverse proxy and certificate authority you already use.
Licence validation is fully offline, so an install with no outbound internet works exactly the same as one with it.
Tell us your jurisdiction, roughly how many people staff your EOC, and what you use today. We will walk you through a live environment and answer the procurement questions properly — licensing, hosting, data ownership and accessibility.
