A towboat crew loading barges on the Mississippi cares about one number above almost everything else: the gauge reading at the next lock or bend. Load too heavy on a falling river and a barge grounds. Miss a fast rise and a lock closes on schedule the dispatcher didn't see coming. Either way, the cost of not checking is a lot higher than the cost of checking.
USGS runs real-time gauge data for the entire inland river system, free, updated every 15 to 60 minutes, no login required. The problem for a mid-size towing company isn't that the data is hard to find, it's that watching a dozen sites along a tow's route means a dozen separate page loads on USGS's own site, several times a day, by hand.
river-water-level-tracker turns that into one search. Give it a state, and it returns every active monitoring site, highest reading first, so the sites closest to flood or low-water risk surface at the top without a separate flood-stage lookup. Switch the parameter to streamflow instead of gauge height when discharge volume matters more than surface elevation.
It's billed per search, not per site returned, so checking a route's worth of gauges costs the same whether that route has 5 sites or 50.
You can try a live check right now with no Apify account needed, or run it directly on Apify for your own states and schedule.
See it alongside the rest of the risk-monitoring actors in the portfolio, including US Weather Tracker for the atmospheric-conditions counterpart to this actor's water-level data, and Disaster Declaration Tracker for the official record once a flood is bad enough to be declared.