How Watch Duty became crucial for tracking the Los Angeles wildfires

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If you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that displays active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indicators, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone from firefighters to everyday people knows about. , became reliable during this week’s historic and devastating wildfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the world of technology in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it cares only about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, reaching the top of the Apple and Google app stores. Over a million people have downloaded it in the past few days alone.

The elegance of the application lies in its simplicity. It does not extract user data, display ads, require any type of login, or track your information. Its simple technical suite and user interface—most of which is maintained by volunteer engineers and reporters—have likely helped save countless lives. Although Watch Duty is free to use, the app accepts tax-deductible donations and offers two levels of membership that unlock additional features, such as a firefighting flight tracker and the ability to set alerts for more than four counties.

With plans to expand the service throughout the United States, as well as abroad and in other emergency services, Watch Duty may eventually replace some of the slower and less reliable local government alert systems for millions of people.

Photo by Lukman Vural Ilibul/Anadolu via Getty Images

The app was born from fire

Watch Duty idea It came to co-founder John Mills While trying to protect his off-grid Sonoma County home from the Walbridge Fire in 2020, he realized there was no single source for all the information people needed to protect themselves from the fire, which ultimately killed 33 people and destroyed 156 others. Houses. John and his friend David Merritt, co-founder and CTO of Watch Duty, decided to create an app to help.

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“This came from an idea that John had and talked to me about four years ago,” Merritt says. Edge. “We built the app in 60 days, and it was run entirely by volunteers, not full-time employees. It was a side project for several engineers, so the goal was to keep it as simple as possible.

Fire reporting is incremental at best in fire-prone areas, often spread across platforms like Facebook and X, where fire departments and counties have verified pages sharing relevant updates. But increasingly, social media platforms are providing automated access to alerting services behind a paywall. Governments also use a wide range of warning systems, causing delays that can cost lives, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires that have forced evacuations for more than 180,000 people. Sometimes, these government-run alerts are sent out in error, causing mass confusion.

Watch Duty simplifies all of this for millions of people.

“We view what we do as a public service,” Merritt says. “It’s a tool that everyone should have, and it provides timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very sparse. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, have their hands tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We’re partnering with sources Government with a focus on firefighting.

“We view what we do as a public service.”

One of the biggest problems with fires, in particular, is that they can move quickly and consume large areas of land and buildings in minutes. For example, the winds that pushed the Palisades Fire reached more than 10,000 acres 90 mph on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the partial alert system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that cost lives.

“Some of the notification and text delivery systems used by government agencies had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for a fire,” Merritt says. “We’re aiming for push notifications in less than a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in Los Angeles are getting push notifications through the app. That’s a lot of messages to send in 60 seconds. Overall, people are getting all of these things.” At about the same time.

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Simple technical stack

For Watch Duty, this type of mass communication requires reliable technology as well as a group of dedicated staff and skilled volunteers. Merritt says Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its services.

“We send notifications in less than a minute.”

The app is built on a mix of technology, including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heroku. The app uses some AI, but only for internal routing of alerts and emails, Merritt says. Watch Duty reporters — those who listen to the scanners and update the app with push notifications about everything from airdrops to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.

“All information is checked for quality, not quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for journalists. For example, we never report on injuries or give specific headlines. It’s all designed according to a specific set of standards. We don’t do editorials. We report what we heard on the scanners.”

According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Although it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit slowly added more people working full-time. “We still have volunteers helping us, but it’s becoming more of an internal paid staff as we grow, as things get more complex, and as we have more stringent processes,” he says.

“All information is checked for quality, not quantity.”

He says there are no plans to charge for the app or collect user data. The approach is kind of Field of dreams A way to build a free app that saves people’s lives: If you build it well, the funding will come.

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“It’s the opposite of what a lot of tech companies do,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get the information and you get out. We have the option to add more photos, but we’re limiting them to those that provide different views of the fire we tracked. We don’t want people to pass on their fate.”

Photo by Frederick J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Information gathering in the era of Trump

Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from places like the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. If the incoming Trump administration decides to carry out the threats Dismantle and dissolve the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Parent agency of the National Weather Servicesuch movements will affect the ability of Watch Duty to operate.

Despite this, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be well insulated from any policy change,” he says. “We either already buy that information ourselves or we’re happy to buy it, and we’ll incur that cost. The fact that we’ll soon be covering the entire United States will incur the cost of anything that shifts from a policy perspective. Our operating costs are mostly salaries. We’re trying to hire really good engineers and have a platform “Really powerful. If we need to raise a grant to buy data from the National Weather Service, we will do that.”

Regardless of what the next administration does, it is clear that Watch Duty has become a critical and essential app for those in Southern California right now. The app currently covers 22 states and plans to roll out nationwide soon.

“We’ve had 1.4 million downloads of the app in the last few days,” Merritt said. “I think we only received 60 support tickets, which shows that something is working there. We are just focused on getting that information out.”

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