Watch Duty: How Fires Have Been Derived from Los Angeles, Not Just a Los Angeles Firefighter’s Dignitary
This is a huge fire. This one is so crowded, it’s the difference. We’ve had “worse” fires. But, like how do you judge worse? This is a disaster. Jesus.
The sheer number of fires in Los Angeles has delivered an unprecedented amount of eyeballs to the young platform. The service became the top app in the store after it gained 600,000 users. The app has surged in popularity before, but never quite to this degree.
Mills says that these fires are something he has never seen before. I spoke to Mills while he was driving into San Francisco on January 9, the third day into the blistering firestorm. We talked about how watch duty has been able to manage this increase of users, what the future holds and what he thinks of all the armchair experts.
The National Weather Service is one of the places that watch duty depends on a lot. Should the incoming Trump administration decide to execute on threats to dismantle and disband the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency to the National Weather Service, such moves would impact Watch Duty’s ability to operate.
Watch Duty doesn’t care about engagement, time spent or ad sales, that’s different than other tech companies. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares 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, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.
During the current fire season in Los Angeles, anyone can use Watch Duty, an app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuate zones, air quality index, and a wealth of other information that everyone from firefighters to regular people have to rely on.
Watch Duty’s Wildfire Tracking App became a crucial lifeline for LA: What do we hope to accomplish in the next few years?
According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Even though it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit has slowly added more full-time people. “We still have volunteers helping us, but it’s becoming more on the internal paid staff as we grow, as things get more complex, and as we have more rigorous processes,” he says.
Merritt is still optimistic even though he’s not. “We will be pretty well insulated from any change to policy,” he says. We will take that cost on if we decide to buy the information ourselves, or if we are happy to buy it. 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 expenses are mostly salaries. We are trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. If we need to raise a grant to buy data from the National Weather Service, then we will.”
Source: How Watch Duty’s wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA
Watch Duty: Monitoring the Palisades Fire Detection via an Autonomous Mobile App for Interferometric Observations and Alerts
“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of tech does,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get what you want and leave when you please. We limit those photos that provide different views of the fire to the ones we have been following, since we want to keep an eye on it. We don’t want people to be sad.
He says there are no plans to ever charge for the app or scrape user data. The approach is kind of the Field of Dreams method to building a free app that saves people’s lives: if you build it well, the funding will come.
He says that all information is checked for quality over quantity. Reporters are bound by a code of conduct. We don’t report on injuries or specific addresses. It’s all tailored with a specific set of criteria. We don’t editorialize. We report on the things we’ve heard.
The app is built on a mix of technology, 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. Reporters at Watch Duty — those who listen to scanners and update the app with push notifications about everything from air drops to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.
“This came out of an idea that John had, and he talked to me about it four years ago,” Merritt tells The Verge. The app was built in 60 days and the volunteers ran it. It was a side project for a lot of engineers, so the aim was to keep it as simple as possible.”
What we are doing is deemed to be a public service. “It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. It is very scattered right now. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, their hands are tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We focus on firefighting with government sources.
One issue around fires is that they can quickly move and consume a lot of land in a short amount of time. The winds that caused the Palisades fire to spread quickly hit 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. We want to have push notifications out in under a minute. 1.5 million people in LA are getting push notifications through the app. It takes 60 seconds for a lot of messages to be sent. People are getting all of it at the same time.