Everyone you alerted, on real mapping, colour-coded by what they need. Layers for urgency, crowding and movement, a what3words grid, switchable basemaps, and draw-around-people-to-message-them.
Where It Is
Open an incident and choose the Map tab. It shows every person across all of that incident's active alerts on one map, updating live as positions arrive.
Pop it out. The map opens in its own window for a second monitor, which is where it belongs during a long incident. The pop-out doesn't join your voice rooms a second time, so opening it never changes what you can hear. It stops being a map the moment the incident closes — a window still drawing pins after a stand-down reads as people who currently need help.
Where Positions Come From
The response page — A satellite fix from someone's browser, refreshed continuously if they're sharing live.
The apps — Continuous position from iOS and Android, which keeps going with the phone in a pocket. See Live Location & Privacy.
A text message — Someone with no app and no page can simply text their location to the alert's number: a Google Maps or Apple Maps share link, a ///what3words address, or raw coordinates. Each is resolved and dropped on the map.
Reading a Pin
A pin's colour is what that person needs from you, not what they said. Red is act now and nothing else — so an evacuating building no longer reads as a casualty list.
Red — Need help, or can't respond. Someone must act.
Amber — Evacuating.
Green — Safe.
Slate — Unclear.
Orange — No reply at all.
A pin's age shows in how it's drawn: fresh positions pulse at full strength, then fade with age, then go grey once they're too old to trust. A position from an hour ago never looks like a position from thirty seconds ago.
Layers
Everything below is a separate toggle in the Layers menu, and your choices are remembered between incidents.
Status colours — Colour each pin by what that person needs.
Urgent heat — A red bloom over clusters of people who need someone now. Deliberately not everyone who is merely not-yet-safe: an evacuation would otherwise bloom over its own exit route.
Group nearby — Cluster bubbles carrying a ring that shows their make-up. On by default. Anyone urgent, or anyone you're focused on, is never hidden inside one.
Crowd — Density bins with a flow arrow per cell, for reading where a crowd is and which way it's moving.
Accuracy — The ±N m disc under each satellite fix. Off by default, because at evacuation density it's the largest thing on the map and washes out everything above it. The figure is in each pin's tooltip either way.
Trails — Where each person has been over the last few hours.
W3W grid — The what3words 3 m grid, overlaid at high zoom.
Filtering by Status
A thousand green dots is not what you look at to direct help. The status filter narrows the map to the people you care about — Everyone, Only people needing someone, or any combination of states you tick. With the map full-screen or popped out, H shows only the people needing someone and A brings everyone back. Press / anywhere to search for one person by name.
The filter is deliberately never remembered between sessions, and if it's hiding somebody urgent the map says so in a banner — working from a picture with a casualty filtered out of it is the one thing this control must never let you do.
Choosing the Mapping
The basemap is a switch on the map itself, changeable mid-incident, and swapping it leaves every layer above exactly where it was.
OS Road — Ordnance Survey. The most street detail available, Great Britain only.
OS Outdoor — Ordnance Survey paths, terrain and rights of way. Great Britain only.
OpenStreetMap — Worldwide; detail varies by area.
MapTiler Streets — Worldwide, consistent detail.
Satellite — Worldwide aerial imagery.
Ordnance Survey is the best mapping there is for Great Britain and completely empty everywhere else — so an incident outside GB on an OS basemap is a blank grey field at the moment you need it most. whoot. notices and offers you a worldwide style, but the switch is yours to make. Note that Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man are not in OS coverage.
what3words
Turn on the W3W grid and the what3words 3 m grid is drawn over the map at high zoom. Click any square to pin it and read its ///address — useful for giving a responder or an emergency service an exact spot with no street to name. Click it again to dismiss. It's a click rather than a hover, so a lookup is always something you meant to do.
Draw Around People and Message Them
Turn on Lasso and draw freehand on the map. Everyone inside what you drew is selected, and you can then send that exact group a message — "do not use the north stairwell" — without picking names off a list.
Draw a loop and it selects everyone the loop encloses, including loops that cross themselves.
Draw a line — along a road, a fence line or a platform edge — and it selects everyone under the band you drew.
The message goes out over the same two channels as any other update: to everyone's response page, where it's free and read-receipted, and/or by SMS. Every lasso send is written to the incident timeline with the shape you drew and the people it caught.
Movement Trails
The Trails layer draws where each person has been, fading toward where they came from so it's obvious at a glance which end is now. It reaches back four hours, and a handful of trails are drawn at once until you ask about somebody specific — forty overlapping journeys is not a picture anyone can read.
What's drawn is not the raw fixes. Satellite error over fifteen seconds is comparable to the distance a person covers in that time, so joining the dots would draw agitated pacing wherever somebody actually stood still. Trails are conditioned into movement, stops and gaps first — a stop is shown as a stop.
How long trail history is kept is your decision, set in Settings → General. See Live Location & Privacy.