Flood Glass tool shows live USGS gauge data and refuses to draw flood polygons

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A developer tool called Flood Glass has been released to counter the common practice of dashboard maps that shade entire counties blue to suggest flooding based on minimal data. The tool pulls a single live USGS gauge reading — in a sample run, the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge showed a discharge of 6,909.3 m³/s and a gage height of 2.48 m — while reporting zero flood pins in the sampled bounding box. Rather than generating a flood polygon from that lone data point, the tool explicitly prints a refusal and returns a citation score of 41 out of 100. The project draws a parallel to an earlier fire-mapping critique, where heat detections were cited without drawing a perimeter. Data is sourced from the USGS National Water Information System and the tool explicitly states it is not a forecast, insurance trigger, or parametric model.

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