Garrett Keene sits on the front porch of his Lake Elsinore, Calif., home that was destroyed in the Airport Fire, one of three major fires in Southern California so far this September. After evacuating with his family, Keene said he watched the Duty to Watch Fire app to see where airdrops of fire retardant were happening as the fire drew closer, but none were being dropped in his neighborhood. Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Hide caption
Toggle caption Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
As climate change lengthens wildfire seasons and increases the likelihood of destructive fires, more people in Western states are looking for information about local wildfires. But finding accurate, specific and timely information can be a challenge, especially in the middle of an emergency.
“The world now expects Twitter, TikTok and push notifications, and the tech world has ignored the community of first responders, firefighters and emergency managers,” said John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty, an app that launched in 2021 and has seen a surge in popularity as more people turn to their phones for wildfire information.
“Things are starting to get really bad as the fires explode,” said Mills, whose app saw a surge in downloads in early September, when three massive fires raged in the mountains around Los Angeles. “Sadly, when something like this happens, it means things are really, really bad.”
A flood of information
During a wildfire, this information can come from a variety of sources, including emergency push notifications from county emergency managers, text messages and emails from sheriff’s offices, social media posts from local, state and federal fire agencies and websites like Inciweb that map fire boundaries.
Mills, a Silicon Valley technologist who lives off electricity in the woods of Sonoma County, experienced this confusing information after battling the 2020 Wallbridge Fire, one of the deadliest summer wildfires across the West Coast that killed 33 people in California alone. “You know, it’s just a matter of time before it comes back to haunt me,” Mills said.
He realised he could address this problem by developing an app that would consolidate all sources of wildfire information and make it easily accessible on a smartphone.
“Hey, I live in the woods, I might die, I’ve got to launch this tomorrow,” Mills recalled thinking during the wildfires, “so we built Watch Duty in 80 days, got it up and running and had 50,000 users in a week.”
The app started out relatively small, tracking fires in three Northern California counties, but in four years it has grown to cover the entire Western US, as well as Texas and Oklahoma.
New technology, old technology
Watch Duty does not collect or sell user data. The basic version is free to download, and the non-profit organization that develops it is funded by donations and subscriptions to the Advanced and Pro versions.
The app collects information from a variety of official wildfire sources.
Watch Duty organizes information on a map of the U.S., dotted with flame icons that represent active wildfires. Click on a flame to see details, including evacuation zones, fire lines, containment percentage and area burned. If you choose to track a fire, you’ll receive push notifications with the most urgent updates, including new evacuation orders. Mhari Shaw/NPR Hide caption
Switch caption Mari Shaw/NPR
Still, its strength comes from a small army of volunteer contributors and staff reporters with experience in firefighting, emergency calls and journalism, who watch the livestreams of outdoor cameras and listen to the radio communications of firefighters on the scene.
Michael Sylvester is one of those contributors, a volunteer turned staff reporter who often works the night shift, posting live updates on active fires from his hometown across the Pacific Ocean. He began his career as a radio scanner at a young age.
“My dad was a volunteer firefighter in New Zealand,” he says, “and through that volunteer work I kept up with his deployments and things like that.”
Sylvester says one day he became curious about how much he could learn about wildfires burning in California half a hemisphere just by listening to a firefighter radio channel that was livestreamed online. He discovered a lot, and his Twitter handle, @CAFireScanner, was born.
“Someone told me one day that I’d saved their life,” Sylvester says quietly. “They had no idea there was a fire on the other side of the hill until they saw the message on Twitter.”
Now, he is offering the same service with Watch Duty, which he says is a better platform to get the right information to the right people.
“When you follow people like me on Twitter, it feels like you have to get every piece of information I post. Are there fires in Southern California? Are there fires on the other side of the state in Sisquillo County?” he explains.
“Watch Duty allows you to subscribe by county and we deliver targeted information to you.”
“This is a 24-hour, real-time operation,” CEO Mills says. “We talk to you through apps, we talk to you through your phone, but what we’re actually listening to is radio, a 100-year-old technology,” he explains. “That’s where we get the most up-to-date, real-time information, because it’s the firefighters who are actually doing the job in that moment.”
“A great tool” as part of your toolbox
“Watch Duty has definitely filled a gap,” said Karen Hancock, public information officer and community outreach specialist for Sonoma County Fire, one of the first counties covered when the app was released in 2021.
Watch Duty gets near real-time information by listening in on the radio communications of firefighters on the front lines. In remote areas where radio signals are weak, Watch Duty has begun setting up its own transmission towers to help fight the fires and allow staff reporters to tune in for updates. J. Emilio Flores/Getty Images Hide caption
Toggle caption J. Emilio Flores/Getty Images
“It’s been a great tool for not only the public, but also firefighters and firefighters,” she said.
The community of Hancock is no stranger to wildfires. In 2017, the fast-spreading Tubbs Fire struck the Coffey Park neighborhood without warning in the middle of the night, killing 22 people and burning more than 5,000 structures. At the time, it was the most destructive wildfire in California history, and quickly became the second most destructive when the Camp Fire ripped through the town of Paradise a year later.
“We’ve found that redundancy is really important,” said Hancock, whose job it is to help keep community members prepared for updates, “but when you’re out there on the ground, your hands are busy in the moment and you’re often not able to provide information fast enough.”
CalFire, California’s wildfire response agency, warned that “inadvertently sharing inaccurate information poses potential risks.” In a statement to NPR, CalFire said it wanted people to visit its website for information and that platforms like Watch Duty “should not be considered official sources of information.”
Hancock always recommends Watch Duty in conjunction with traditional sources such as local emergency notifications. “It’s just a tool, just another way of getting information out,” she noted.
“There aren’t that many emergency services like us, and only a select few of us have the ability to get the word out through social media, emergency alerts, etc.,” Hancock explained. “Having another resource that can reach more people in the community is life-saving.”
