A warning only works if someone hears it.

When a flash flood or a fire is coming, the people whose job it is to warn us usually do. The National Weather Service issues the warning. Emergency managers send their alerts. The information exists, often with time to act.

And then it has to reach a person. At two in the morning, that is where it fails.

The 2 a.m. gap

The weather radio is in a drawer, or it was never bought. The TV is off. The only other radio may be the one in the car. At a campsite, a cabin or a relative’s house, there may be no local alert system you have signed up for at all. The warning goes out, and the people in its path are asleep.

I kept coming back to the July 2025 flood on the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country, which took whole families and children at camp. The warnings were issued. The river rose in the dark. The gap was not in the forecast. It was in the last few feet between the warning and the person.

Seeing the lives lost in that flood made me ask, “How can people in those situations be alerted?” That was the beginning of Keryx Maps. Not that one way of getting an emergency alert is better than another, but there should be more than one. My next thought was, “What would someone leave on, even when sleeping?”

The one device within reach

There is one thing almost everyone keeps beside them at night, charged and switched on: their phone.

That is the idea Keryx Maps is built on. If the warning can reach the phone, and the phone is allowed to wake you for it, the last few feet are covered.

What Keryx Maps does

  • Watches the places you care about. Download the map regions where you live, work and travel, and Keryx follows real-time hazard data for them: severe weather, floods, fire, earthquakes and more, from 45+ data feeds across 25+ sources.
  • Wakes you for what matters. Alerts arrive as notifications on your phone. On Android you can let the most serious alerts break through Do Not Disturb. On iPhone they arrive as Time Sensitive notifications, which come through a Focus mode when you allow them. Either way, you choose which hazards count.
  • Keeps working when the network doesn’t. Maps, your saved places and routing live on your device. When cell towers are down or overloaded, you can still see where you are, where the hazard is, and a way out.
  • Keeps your location yours. Your position is used on your device. We built Keryx so that we never hold it.

When the infrastructure fails

The moments that matter most are the ones when the usual tools stop working. Power goes out. The cell network jams as everyone tries to call at once. A map app that needs a connection becomes a blank screen.

Keryx Maps was designed for that moment first. Download your region before you need it, and the map, the roads and the route around a closed one are already in your pocket.

Why “Keryx”

In ancient Greece, a keryx was a herald: the person who carried a message to the people who needed to hear it. That is the whole job. We don’t make the warnings. We carry them the last few feet.

What Keryx Maps is not

Keryx Maps does not issue warnings, and it does not replace the official ones. Keep your phone’s emergency alerts turned on, follow your local authorities, and leave when you are told to leave. Keryx is one more way for the warning to find you, not the only one.

No one should be hurt because a warning never reached them. That is why we built this.