The watch, the response, and the record.
Launching October 2026WatchKat is a self-hosted emergency operations center platform for counties, cities, tribal nations, and agencies. It runs on your servers, in your jurisdiction, and it is built on the doctrine your EOC already runs: NIMS, ICS, and the FEMA community lifelines.
The problem
Most emergency managers still run disaster response operations on a notepad, spreadsheet, or whiteboard. The record of what happened gets rebuilt afterward from memory, and it's never guaranteed to capture the whole picture. WatchKat is built so the documentation is a by-product of doing the work, not a second job after it.
What WatchKat is
Incident status, lifeline conditions, resources, assignments, and the activity log all reference the same incident. Change something on one screen and every position sees it live.
Every entry is timestamped and attributed. Corrections are amendments: the original stays preserved and marked superseded, so the log holds up in an after-action review or a public-records request.
ICS positions and sections, FEMA's eight community lifelines, and the standard ICS forms your staff already know are the working structure of the software, not PDFs bolted onto it.
Installs on your own server, Windows or Linux. No cloud tenancy required, no data leaving your jurisdiction that you didn't send yourself, and licensing that verifies entirely offline.
Scope, stated plainly
Final release scope is set at release.
Pricing
WatchKat will sell one way: a single annual price per agency, with every capability included. No per-seat metering, no per-incident pricing, no modules to unlock. Pricing is set at a level that even small agencies can afford. The number goes public the day WatchKat does.
The founder
WatchKat was built by an emergency manager, for emergency managers.
I have spent 25 years in public safety across private, nonprofit, county, and Tribal organizations. More than 14 years of my experience was in emergency management, and most recently, I served as a county emergency management director in Oregon.
I have seen firsthand the effects of budget cuts and personnel loss: more tasks and more pressure on an emergency manager who still holds the same duties and legal mandates the department was already barely keeping up with.
I have run activations myself using pen and paper, hastily scribbled whiteboard notes, or spreadsheet lists. I wanted a tool that made it easy to organize, capture, and recall everything required for an activation. The more I thought about the importance of the work, and the effort my peers put into it, the more I built.
WatchKat is the tool I needed in the EOC: the watch, the response, and the record. Everything in one place, on servers my county IT controlled.
When I worked in homeless healthcare, I developed a saying that has guided my life ever since, and I believe it wholly:
"If, in your time on earth, you manage to offer help or hope to one who has utterly forsaken it, then yours was a life well lived."
I hope this product helps you help others.
Corey Padron
Founder, SARAem LLC
Meet our mascot, SARA.October
WatchKat launches its first public demonstration this October 5 through 8, at the OEMA Annual Conference at Wildhorse Resort and Casino in Pendleton, Oregon.
If you are attending, come find our booth. If you want time set aside, email me ahead of the conference, and I will be waiting for you.
OEMA 2026 Annual Conference:
details and registration at the
conference page
and oregonemergency.com.
Contact
Need us standing by during a big event? It’s all included in the price.
Before, during, and after procurement.
That is our promise!
loading…
Questions, procurement timeline, or a demonstration request:
send an email and you will get a reply from my team, not a bot.
loading…
That button reaches my own inbox at loading…