How Live Accident Tracking Works: Inside Our Data Pipeline

Transparency matters when you publish numbers about human lives. Here is exactly how this site works.

Live incident reports

Our live map and feeds are powered by the GDELT Project, an open research platform that monitors news media worldwide, machine-translating coverage from 65 languages in near real time. Every 15 minutes we query GDELT for accident-related coverage — road crashes, rail disasters, aviation incidents, maritime accidents, industrial explosions — from local outlets across every continent, and plot the reports on the map. Bigger pulses mean more coverage of that location in the last 24 hours.

What a marker actually means

A marker represents news coverage of an accident at that location — not a direct feed from police or emergency services. That distinction matters: media coverage skews toward severe incidents and English-language sources, and one major accident can generate many reports. We aggregate reports by location to reduce double counting.

The estimated counters

No live global casualty feed exists — anyone claiming otherwise is guessing. Our "2026 estimated" counters are statistical projections: we take the World Health Organization's published road-death rates for each country, scale them to the current population, and run the clock forward through the year. The global figure of ~1.19 million deaths per year works out to about one death every 26 seconds, and the counters tick at exactly that measured pace. They are labelled "estimated" everywhere they appear.

What we don't do

• We never invent incident reports — every headline links to its original source.
• We never present estimates as confirmed counts.
• We don't publish graphic imagery.

Sources

GDELT Project (news monitoring) · WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety (rates) · UN population estimates. Questions about the methodology? Contact us.