Sources & Fact-Checking

Our source hierarchy

Not all sources carry equal weight. For a preparedness publication covering live hazards, the order matters more than usual.

Tier 1 — Official and primary

Preferred for anything about hazards, warnings or safety:

• National Weather Service and NOAA
• FEMA and Ready.gov
• U.S. Geological Survey
• CDC and EPA
• State and local emergency management agencies
• Fire departments and public-safety agencies
• Statutes, regulations and adopted codes
• Manufacturer manuals and technical documentation

Tier 2 — Scientific and professional

• Peer-reviewed journals
• Recognized medical and scientific societies
• University research
• Accredited testing organizations
• Consensus standards bodies

Tier 3 — High-quality secondary reporting

Used for context and explanation when primary material is unavailable or needs interpretation. Never used as the sole basis for a safety-critical instruction.

Why the hierarchy is ordered this way

For most subjects, a good secondary source is perfectly adequate. For hazards it is not, and the reason is specific: warnings, watches and advisories are legal designations with defined criteria, issued by named agencies, and they change.

A news article describing a tornado warning is a description of an official act. The official act itself — its criteria, its polygon, its expiry — lives at the National Weather Service. When the two disagree, or when the article has aged past the warning, only one of them is still true.

The same logic applies to product safety. A manufacturer manual states the operating limits the manufacturer will stand behind. A blog post summarizing it does not.

Working with official sources

Most of what matters on this site originates with a handful of federal agencies, and each has quirks worth knowing.

• The National Weather Service issues alerts with defined criteria, a geographic footprint and an expiry time. An alert can be updated, superseded or cancelled, and the current state is the one that counts.
• The USGS publishes earthquake data that is revised after initial detection. Early magnitudes are preliminary and frequently change.
• FEMA and Ready.gov publish household preparedness guidance that is periodically revised. We cite the current version and re-check it rather than carrying forward what was true when a page was first written.
• The CDC is the reference for health-related preparedness guidance, including respiratory protection and water safety after an emergency.

Federal guidance is a floor, not a ceiling. State and local emergency management agencies issue guidance specific to local hazards, and where the two differ for a given reader, local instruction takes precedence.

Currency and drift

Official guidance changes. Respirator recommendations, water treatment advice and generator safety guidance have all shifted over the past decade, sometimes substantially.

So a source is checked not only for authority but for currency: is this the current version, has the agency revised it, and does our page reflect the revision? A correct citation of superseded guidance is still wrong guidance.

What we do not do

• We do not cite a source we have not read.
• We do not cite a secondary article as though it were the primary document it describes.
• We do not present a manufacturer's marketing figure as an independent measurement.
• We do not build a Sources list to look rigorous. If a source is listed, it was used.
• We do not treat AI output as a source. It is not one.

Product and commercial sourcing

On commercial pages, five different kinds of evidence are routinely blended into one confident-sounding claim. We keep them labeled:

• Manufacturer specifications — what the maker publishes.
• Retailer price and availability — accurate at the time of writing, and subject to change without notice.
• Independent lab testing — third-party measurement, cited.
• Owner feedback — recurring themes across verifiable customer reviews, reported as trends, never as invented individual testimonials.
• Editorial testing — our own hands-on use, only where it happened.

What we check

Before a factual claim is published, it is checked for:

• the source, and whether it is the primary one
• the date, and whether the guidance has since changed
• geographic applicability — U.S. federal, state or local
• units, and conversion errors
• definitions, especially where an everyday word has a technical meaning
• whether a watch, warning or status is the official designation
• whether a number is measured, estimated or manufacturer-provided

How we handle numbers

Numbers carry more authority than they usually deserve, so they get specific treatment.

• Measured, estimated or claimed? A tested runtime, a modelled estimate and a manufacturer's headline figure are three different things and are labeled as such.
• Under what conditions? A battery capacity, a filter lifespan or a heater output is meaningless without the load, the water quality or the room size it assumes.
• Rounded honestly. We do not restate an approximate figure with false precision because a rounder number reads better.
• Ranges over points. Where the honest answer is a range, we publish the range instead of picking the most quotable end of it.

When sources disagree

Official sources occasionally conflict with each other, or with a manufacturer, or with widely repeated practice. When that happens we do not quietly pick the most convenient one.

The page says that guidance differs, identifies who says what, and — for anything safety-related — defaults to the more cautious position while explaining the disagreement. A reader who knows the guidance is contested is better equipped than one given false certainty.

Live data on the Emergency Map

The Live Emergency Map aggregates official feeds server-side. The rules it runs on are the same rules stated here:

• Every source is identified on the page, with its own status.
• Update timestamps are shown, not implied.
• A source failure is never displayed as zero. If a feed is unavailable, the page says so rather than showing a reassuring nothing.
• We never invent geometry. An alert published without map coordinates stays in the event list, labeled, and is not placed at a guessed location.
• If satellite fire detection is added, it will be labeled as thermal detection — not as a confirmed wildfire.
• Near-real-time is not real-time, and we do not describe it as such.

Safety-critical claims

Some subjects can hurt someone if we get them wrong. These receive stricter verification against official guidance, and are written to fail safe:

• First aid and medication
• Respiratory protection
• Generators, fuel and electrical work
• Carbon monoxide
• Water treatment and food safety
• Evacuation decisions
• Interpretation of active warnings

Citations

Important claims link to the source that actually supports them, where a link is useful to the reader. We do not append decorative source lists that were assembled for the appearance of rigor rather than used in the writing.