How watch duty is keeping up with the California wildfires is called “All Hands on Deck”
Watch Duty: An App for Tracking Wildfires, Evacuation Zones, Wind Directions, Air Quality Index, Directions and Directions
This is such a destructive fire. This one is just so populated, that’s the difference. We have had a lot of fires. But, like how do you judge worse? This is not a good thing. Jesus.
A lot of eyeballs were delivered to the young platform by the large scale of the Los Angeles fires. The service gained 600,000 users over the course of a single night, and became the top app in the app store. The app has surged in popularity before, but never quite to this degree.
Watch Duty is an app that tracks wildfires and disaster information and presents it to users in as close to real time as possible in the form of maps and notifications about fire perimeters, evacuation zones, and air quality. Its CEO and founding father is John Clarke Mills, a Northern California resident who was inspired to create the app after a wildfire in 2021 threatened his home. Mills was frustrated by a lack of timely information and unsure whether or not to evacuate, so he created a platform that will enable people to track fire movements near them. The app has grown into a critical resource for fire-prone areas in the US and it now covers 22 states.
This kind of mass communication needs reliable technology as well as a group of dedicated staff and volunteers. Merritt says that Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its service.
In the tech world, watch duty is the only one that ignores user engagement, time spent and ad sales. The nonprofit behind it cares more about the accuracy of the information it gives and the time it takes the service to deliver it. The app rocketed to the top of both Apple and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it in the past few days.
If you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably heard of Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality index, wind directions, and a lot of other information that people rely on during this week.
Watch Duty Wildfire Tracking App Losses Angels: a Critical Lifeline for LA, Inc. Source: News from the Verge
“We got 1.4 million app downloads in the last few days,” according to Merritt. “I think we have only received 60 support tickets, so that shows that something is working there. We are only focused on delivering this information.
Even still, Merritt is optimistic. He says they will be insulated from changes to policy. We can either buy that information ourselves or we can purchase it from someone else. The fact that we’re soon going to be covering the entire US will defray the cost of anything that shifts from a policy perspective. Our operation costs are mostly salaries. We are trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. We will raise money if we need to buy data from the National Weather Service.
Source: How Watch Duty’s wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA
Watch Duty: A Web-Based App to Save Lives and Save Land and Property for Real-Time Investigations of Public Fires and Respiritations
“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of tech does,” Merritt says. We don’t want you to stay in the app for long. You get information and get out. Adding more photos is not an option at the moment, we limit them to those that provide a different view of a fire. We don’t want people doom scrolling.”
He says there are no plans to ever charge for the app or scrape user data. The method of building a free app that saves peoples lives is similar to the Field of Dreams method, where funding will come if it is built well.
“All information is vetted for quality over quantity,” he says. There is a code of conduct for reporters. For example, we never report on injuries or give specific addresses. It’s all tailored with a specific set of criteria. We don’t editorialize. We report on what we have heard on the scanners.”
The app is built on a mix of technology, including Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heroku. The app only uses some artificial intelligence for internal purposes. The reporters at Watch Duty are mostly volunteers, who coordinate coverage via a communication service like Slack.
John and I talked four years ago about an idea that he had, according to Merritt. “We built the app in 60 days, and it was run completely by volunteers, no full-time staff. It was a side project for a lot of engineers so the aim was to keep it simple.
“We view what we are doing as a public service,” says Merritt. “It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very scattered. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, their hands are tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We work with government sources in the area of fire fighting.
One of the biggest issues around fires, in particular, is that they can move quickly and consume large swaths of land and structures in minutes. For example, the winds that drove the Palisades fire to spread to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 miles per hour on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the piecemeal alert system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that cost lives.
“Some of the delivery systems for push notifications and text messages that government agencies use had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for fire,” says Merritt. Push notifications are a thing we want to have in under a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in LA are getting push notifications through the app. That’s a lot of messages to send out in 60 seconds. People are getting all of it at the same time.
