How on-duty became critical to tracking the Los Angeles wildfires

If you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably familiar with Watch Duty. This free app displays active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality index, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone from firefighters to the public knows. , have become the go-to during this week’s historic and devastating wildfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the tech industry in that we don’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed at which the service delivers that information. The app itself became popular and rose to the top of Apple and Google’s app stores. More than 1 million people have downloaded it in the past few days alone.

The elegance of the app lies in its simplicity. We do not collect user data, display ads, require logins, or track information. Its simple tech stack and UI (most of which is maintained by volunteer engineers and reporters) has likely helped save countless lives. Watch Duty is free to use, but the app accepts tax-deductible donations and offers a two-tiered service for additional features such as fire flight tracking and the ability to set alerts for four or more counties. We offer membership.

With plans to expand the service across the U.S. and overseas and to other emergency services, Watch Duty will ultimately replace slow and unreliable municipal warning systems for millions of people. may be replaced.

Watch Duty Ideas I came to meet co-founder John Mills. He was trying to save his off-grid Sonoma County home from the 2020 Walbridge Fire. They realized there was no single source of information for people to get all the information they needed to protect themselves from the fire that ultimately killed 33 people and destroyed 156. houses. John and his friend David Merritt, co-founder and CTO of Watch Duty, decided to build an app to help.

“This was John’s idea and he told me about it four years ago,” Merritt says. The Verge. “We built the app in 60 days, with no full-time staff and run entirely by volunteers. This was a side project for many of our engineers, so our goal was to keep it as simple as possible. It was.”

Reports of fires are piecemeal at best in fire-prone areas and often scattered across platforms like Facebook and X, where fire departments and counties have pages to share relevant updates. . But social media platforms increasingly have automated access to alerting services behind paywalls. The government also uses a variety of warning systems, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires, which can force evacuations and cause delays that can cost lives for years. 180,000 people. And in some cases, these government-run alerts can be sent in error, causing widespread disruption.

Watch Duty simplifies all of this for millions of people.

“We think of what we do as a public service,” Merritt said. “This is a utility that everyone should have, providing timely information related to emergency safety. It’s currently so cluttered that even the best-intentioned agencies themselves have trouble getting their hands on it. are bound by bureaucracy and contracts. We partner with government officials with a focus on fire protection.”

One of the biggest problems, especially with fires, is that they move quickly and can consume large tracts of land and buildings in minutes. For example, the high winds that started the Palisades Fire spread over 10,000 acres. 90 mph on Tuesday. When time matters, the fragmented warning system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays and cost lives.

“Some of the push notification and text message delivery systems used by government agencies have a 15-minute delay, which is not good for fires,” Merritt said. “We’re working to send push notifications in under a minute. Currently, 1.5 million people in Los Angeles receive push notifications through the app. Messages sent in 60 seconds are extremely slow. Generally, people are getting it around the same time.”

On duty, this type of mass communication requires not only reliable technology, but also a dedicated staff and a group of skilled volunteers. Merritt said Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and agreements to provide its services.

The app is built using a combination of technologies including Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heraku. Merritt said the app uses some AI, but only for internal routing of alerts and emails. Watch Duty reporters — those who listen to scanner audio and update apps with push notifications on everything from airdrops to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.

“All information is scrutinized for quality rather than quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for reporters. For example, we don’t report on injuries or give out specific addresses. Everything is tailored based on certain criteria. I We don’t edit. We report what we hear on the scanner.”

Merritt said the app has 100% uptime. The nonprofit organization started with volunteer engineers, but has gradually added full-time staff. “We still have volunteers helping us, but as we grow and things become more complex and require more rigorous processes, it becomes more and more in-house paid staff. There is,” he says.

He said there are no plans to charge for the app or collect user data. The approach is a kind field of dreams How to build a free app that saves people’s lives: If you build it well, you get funded.

“This is the antithesis of what a lot of technology is doing,” Merritt said. “We don’t want you to waste your time on apps. Get the information and go out. There’s an option to add more photos, but we limit ourselves to those that give different views of the fires we’re tracking. We don’t want people to do catastrophic scrolling.”

The watch relies heavily on publicly available information from agencies such as the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. If the incoming Trump administration decides to carry out its threats; Dismantle and disband the EPA (monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Parent agency of the National Weather Servicesuch movements may affect Watch Duty’s ability to operate.

Still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be fairly protected from policy changes,” he says. “We already buy that information ourselves, or we’re willing to buy it, and we pay that cost. The fact that we’ll soon be covering all of the United States makes policy We’re going to cover any costs that change in terms of our operating costs, which are mostly salaries. We’re trying to hire really good engineers and build a very solid platform. 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’s clear that Watch Duty is now an important and necessary app for Southern Californians. The app currently covers 22 states and will soon be rolled out nationwide.

“1.4 million apps have been downloaded in the past few days,” Merritt said. “I think we’ve only received 60 support tickets, which tells us something is working. We’re focused on getting this information out.”