Conditions
Live right now
Feet above normal at S1 on Big Reed Island Creek, straight from the station. Dashed lines are the station’s alert stages; stage 3, five feet above normal, is the top of the bank — above that line the creek is out of its banks. The words on each line say who gets an alert when the creek reaches it. Times Eastern. Updates every minute.
Saturday night on Big Reed Island Creek, our station watched it happen — and raised its first alert at 2:04 AM, nearly five hours before the crest. You can put one of these on your own water.
A New River Headwaters station watching Big Reed Island Creek come up to the top of its bank on August 2nd, 2026. The sensor is the white arm across the top of the frame, reaching out over the water.
The night, as the instruments saw it
Every frame below is real data off the creek — no model, no re-creation. The dashed lines are that station’s alert thresholds which are programmed by location. Each one stamps the time and level when the creek crossed it. The step at 2 AM is not rainfall — it is a dam failing fifteen miles upstream, which we were able to identify, size and time from the shape of the water alone.
Creek level in feet above normal, 8 PM Saturday to 7:30 AM Sunday. Times EDT.
It was the same system you saw on the news — 6–7 inches of rain and washed-out roads in Ararat, flooding on Stillhouse Road in Crooked Oak, and a state of emergency in Mount Airy after the Ararat River jumped more than fifteen feet.
Days later a neighbour mentioned that the dam on the golf-course lake at Olde Mill had broken that night. Working backwards from our own record — the shape of the rise, the channel geometry, and how much water the creek must have carried to rise the way it did — we put the release at 373 acre-feet. The Army Corps of Engineers has that lake on record at 393. We put the failure between 12:06 and 12:32 AM; a passer-by's report reached police at 12:41 AM. The station never saw the dam. It only ever saw the water.
Check your creek
This is the Big Reed Island Creek basin — 267 square miles of mountain water, mapped from elevation data. Teal creeks are watched today by our live station. Amber lights up when the planned sites go in. Gray water: nobody is watching it yet. Drop a pin anywhere on the map — or use your location, or type your address — to see your warning time.
Warning times are travel-time estimates (a flood wave moving ~7 mph down the channel) from each station to your point — they will be calibrated against real events, starting with Aug 1–2. Your location is computed in your browser and never stored. Estimates are not a substitute for official warnings.
Free flood alerts
Pick the place you care about — where you live, or a low crossing you drive every day. You’ll hear from us when the creek is coming up at that spot, and stay quiet the rest of the year.
One place is live today, with more going in as we learn them — every alert level has to be watched happening before we’ll trust it. If yours isn’t listed yet, sign up anyway: we’ll tell you the day it goes in, and knowing where people are waiting is how we decide what’s next.
Tell us what it caught. The nearest weather radar is 27 miles away and its beam passes about 2,000 feet above the ground here — so the rain that fills these creeks is largely invisible to it. What is standing in your yard is not.
No account needed, and it takes about twenty seconds. Anywhere in the headwaters counts — upstream readings are the most useful of all, because that water is on its way here.
Free. Message frequency varies with creek conditions; message and data rates may apply. This is not an emergency service — in an emergency, call 911.
A station on your land
Every gray creek on that map is water nobody watches. If one of them runs through your land, you're the person who can change that — a station on your creek measures the water and publishes what it measures — to you, and to anyone downstream who subscribes. Here's what a monitored site is:
No price list, no pressure — every site is different (terrain, creek access, radio line-of-sight), so it starts with a conversation. We'll look at your creek together and tell you honestly what it would take. Or just write to [email protected].
For everyone downstream
You don't need to own a station to get warned by one. When a monitored creek starts rising, we send escalating alerts by text or push notification to anyone signed up below it. Free, and they always will be.
Sign up for alertsFor counties & towns
One station warns one creek. A network of them warns a county — and every station added upstream buys warning time for everyone below it. We work with emergency management on siting, coverage and alert routing to your dispatch.
Talk about coverageFor coverage, write to [email protected].
Where the water comes from
Our station watches about 41 square miles of the Blue Ridge plateau — wooded ridges, steep hollows and pasture — drained by Big Reed Island Creek and branches like Pine Creek and Grassy Creek. Downstream, the whole creek gathers 267 square miles before it meets the New River at Claytor Lake.
Blue Ridge Twin, our flood model, follows these same steps hour by hour: how full the soil is, how much water runs off now and how much later, whether it fell as rain or snow and when that snow will melt, whether the ground is frozen, and how long each part of the basin takes to reach the station — then it checks itself against what the station actually reads.
Why this works
A flash flood on a small, steep creek is a local event. By the time it registers in a county-wide forecast, the water is already up. The warning that gets people out has to be local, automatic, and awake at two in the morning — measured on the creek itself, not interpolated from a gauge twenty miles downstream.
So we build the measurement. Every New River Headwaters station also feeds Blue Ridge Twin, the predictive flood model behind this — which is how a station on your creek turns into advance warning for your neighbors, and how their stations turn into advance warning for you. The model gets sharper with every site added to the basin.
Our first full deployment is going into the Rocky Broad valley above Bat Cave and Chimney Rock, North Carolina — one of the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Helene, where the creek gave almost no warning at all. Once our stations are on that water, the model projects up to 79 minutes of warning.
The technology
Stream monitoring covers a lot of ground — staff gauges, pressure transducers, bubblers, acoustic and radar sensors, all of them good at the job they were built for. We designed ours around the hardest case we know of: a small mountain creek that can come up faster than anyone downstream expects. A station that keeps up with that is more than equal to a river, a larger stream, or any water that moves more slowly. Here's what that took.
Every station reads the creek two ways at once — laser (LiDAR) and millimeter-wave radar — from above the water, where debris can't tear it out. The two sensors cross-check every reading: fog blinds a laser, so the radar carries it; each covers the other's weaknesses. We're not aware of another creek-monitoring system that runs both. All of this technology was developed right here in Carroll County.
In quiet weather the station reads every 15 minutes to save power. The moment the creek starts rising, it steps itself up — all the way to a reading every 15 seconds — and starts issuing staged alerts on its own, no human in the loop. Federal gauges report every 15 to 60 minutes; in a flash flood that's the difference between a warning and a description of what already happened.
Solar powered with days of battery reserve, reporting over its own long-range radio network — no Wi-Fi at the creek, no phone line, no mains power to fail in a storm. On the night of Aug 1–2 it ran through the entire flood on its own battery, taking thousands of readings.
Blue Ridge Twin is our forecasting engine: a digital twin of the basin built from elevation data — every ridge, every tributary, all 267 square miles — fused with on-site readings of rainfall, humidity, temperature, dewpoint, soil moisture, water quality and creek level. It doesn't just report the water; it projects travel time from measured flow — an estimate, not a guarantee. Every real flood recalibrates it: Aug 1–2 is already in the model, tuning its travel times against what the creek actually did. It gets smarter with every storm and sharper with every station added.
Our stations are the sharp local eyes, but the Twin drinks from everything: federal USGS river gauges, on-site weather stations measuring rainfall, soil moisture, temperature and wind — conditions that decide how fast a basin sheds water into its creeks. Where a federal gauge already watches a river, we use it; where nobody watches, we build.
This isn't a lab claim. On its first major flood the system detected the rise at 2:02 AM, escalated through four alert stages on schedule, tracked a 4-foot surge in 40 minutes, and caught a 10.2-foot crest at 6:54 AM — on a creek no federal gauge watches. The nearest federal gauges sit miles away on neighboring forks; this one was ours alone. Scroll up and watch the recording. That's the product.
New River Headwaters LLC · flood & environmental monitoring · predictive modeling by Blue Ridge Twin
All data on this page was recorded by our Big Reed Island Creek station, Carroll County, Virginia, August 1–2, 2026.
