How Watch Duty Became Crucial to Tracking Los Angeles Wildfires

If you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably already familiar with Watch Duty, a free app that shows fire conditions, required evacuation zones, air quality index, wind direction and a variety of other information shared by everyone from firefighters to the public. , we have come to rely on during this week’s historic and devastating bushfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it isn’t interested in user engagement, time spent, or selling ads. The 501(c)(3) non-profit organization is concerned only with the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the Service can deliver that information. The app itself became popular, rising to the top of Apple and Google’s app stores. More than 1 million people have downloaded the app in the past few days alone.

The elegance of this app lies in its simplicity. It does not scrape user data, show ads, require any kind of login, or track information. A simple tech stack and UI maintained by mostly volunteer engineers and journalists would have helped save countless lives. Watch Duty is free to use, but the app offers a two-tier membership that takes tax-deductible donations and unlocks additional features, such as a fire flight tracker and the ability to set alerts for four or more counties.

With plans to expand its services across the United States, as well as overseas and other emergency services, Watch Duty could eventually replace some of the slow and unreliable local government alert systems for millions of people.

The idea for Watch Duty came from co-founder John Mills while trying to protect off-grid Sonoma County homes from the 2020 Walbridge Fire. He realized that there was no single source that provided all the information people needed to protect themselves from fire. Ultimately, 33 people were killed and 156 homes were destroyed. John and his friend David Merritt, co-founder and CTO of Watch Duty, decided to create an app to help.

“This came from John’s idea, and he told me about it four years ago,” says Merritt. The Verge. “We built the app in 60 days and it was run entirely by volunteers rather than full-time staff. “It was a side project for many engineers, so the goal was to keep it as simple as possible.”

Reports of fires are fragmented in fire-prone areas and often distributed across platforms such as Facebook and X, which has identified pages where fire departments and counties share relevant updates. But more and more social media platforms are adding automated access to their alerting services behind paywalls. Additionally, the government’s use of various warning systems creates delays that can result in loss of life, especially for fast-moving fires such as the Palisades and Eaton fires, which forced the evacuation of more than 180,000 people. And sometimes, these government-run alerts are sent by mistake, causing mass chaos.

Watch Duty simplifies all of this for millions of people.

“We see what we do as a public service,” says Merritt. “This is a utility where everyone needs to have timely and relevant information to stay safe during an emergency. It’s very scattered now. Even agencies with the best intentions have their hands tied by bureaucracy and contracts. “We are focused on firefighting and working with government sources.”

One of the biggest problems with fires in particular is that they move quickly and can burn large amounts of land and structures within minutes. For example, the winds that spread the Palisade Fire to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 mph on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the piecemeal alert systems that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that can cost lives.

“Some of the push notification and text messaging systems that government agencies use have 15-minute delays, which is not good for fires,” says Merritt. “We strive to receive push notifications within one minute. Currently, 1.5 million people in LA receive push notifications through the app. There are too many messages to send in 60 seconds. Typically, people are getting everything at about the same time.”

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

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

“All information is researched for quality rather than quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for journalists. For example, we do not report injuries or provide specific addresses. It’s all tailored to certain criteria. We don’t edit. We report what we hear on the scanner.”

According to Merritt, the app has 100% uptime. Although it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit slowly added full-time employees. “We still have volunteers who help us, but as the company grows, things become more complex and our processes become more rigorous, we have a growing proportion of internal paid staff,” he says.

He said there are no plans to charge for the app or scrape user data. The approach is kind of field of dreams How to create a free app that saves people’s lives: if you build it well, the money will come.

“This is the exact opposite of what a lot of technologies do,” says Merritt. “We don’t want you spending time on the app. Get the information and leave. There is an option to add more photos, but we will limit ourselves to those that provide a variety of perspectives on the fires we have been tracking. We don’t want people doomscrolling.”

Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from sources such as the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. If the incoming Trump administration decides to follow through on its threat to dismantle and dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of Air Quality Monitoring (EPA) and the National Weather Service, such action would impact Watch Duty’s ability to operate.

Still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be pretty well protected from policy changes,” he says. “We are already purchasing that information ourselves, or we are willing to do so, and we will bear the cost of that. The fact that we will soon cover the entire United States will bear the full cost of change from a policy perspective. Our operating expenses are mostly salaries. We’re trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. “If we need to increase subsidies to buy data from the National Weather Service, we will do that.”

No matter what the next administration does, it’s clear that Watch Duty has become an important and necessary app for Southern Californians today. The app currently covers 22 states and will soon be rolled out nationally.

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