About mywater

This is a proof of concept for a community-run map for residents of Clearlake Oaks (Lake County, CA) to report water quality issues — main breaks, outages, boil-water notices, and ongoing concerns about taste, smell, color, or pressure. It exists because reports were scattered across Facebook posts and hard to track over time; this site demonstrates a way to keep a public, persistent record instead.

How location works

When you file a report, you choose one of two ways to place it on the map:

Show my location places your report at your specific parcel. Anyone viewing the map can see it's your property.

Obscure my location places your report at the center of a small cluster of neighboring parcels (usually around 8) instead of your specific address. We never capture, transmit, or store your exact address for an obscured report — the map only ever shows you a cluster to choose from, not a point.

Limits of anonymization

Obscuring your location works by grouping you with neighboring homes along the same street, usually around 8 but never fewer than 6. In most of Clearlake Oaks, this genuinely hides which specific home a report came from. But on very short streets or in sparsely built areas, there may not be enough neighboring homes to form a group that size. When that happens, we don't offer that area as an anonymization option at all — you'll only see a cluster on the map if it has enough parcels nearby to actually protect your privacy.

We also don't publish photos for obscured reports, since a phone photo can carry hidden location data (EXIF metadata) that would defeat the point of obscuring your address.

If you need real anonymity, choose "obscure my location" and avoid including identifying details — like your house number — in your description.

Other things worth knowing

Reports publish immediately with no review — there's no account system, and no moderation queue. This keeps the site simple, but it means reports reflect what residents submit, not a verified record. Submissions are rate-limited to prevent spam, but the limit is intentionally light.

The code for the app is/will be? available, and is supposed to illustrate the idea of small hyper local applications that can be cloned to run in different communities with local control of each installation. It could also be extended to be intrinsically multi-tenant, so communities could have unique uris, but run on shared infrastructure to share costs.

At this point (8/26/2026) it is a proof of concept.

The tool was 99% written by Jesse Vincent's Super Powers Claude Skill.

I'm a resident of Clear Lake Oaks, and I saw all of the scattered posts on Facebook about our water quality, and our water problems. We would have a water break that affected three streets and the whole community would react as though it affected everyone.

And in the late summer we normally have issues with the water. We get our water from the lake, and even with treatment it can have issues. And also, there have been times when people are reporting issues and my water seems fine.

So I thought, what if we had a tool to let us share our experiences.

With maps.

The current data is fabricated, it exists to illustrate how the tool would work if it goes live. Feel free to add reports, but they are not (yet) real.

And direct problems or questions to Rich.Gibson@gmail.com