If you live in Los Angeles, you're probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indices, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone from firefighters Even ordinary people can consult. , have come to rely on during this week's historic and devastating wildfires.
Watch Duty is unique in the tech world because it doesn't care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization behind it is only concerned with the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off and has risen to the top of the Apple and Google app stores. More than 1 million people have downloaded it in the last few days alone.
The elegance of the application lies in its simplicity. It does not collect user data, does not display ads, does not require any type of login or tracks your information. Its simple technology and user interface (most of which is maintained by volunteer engineers and reporters) have likely helped save countless lives. While 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 to other emergency services, Watch Duty may eventually replace some of the slowest and least reliable local government alert systems for millions of people.
Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
An application born from fire
The idea of Watch Duty reached co-founder John Mills while trying to protect his isolated 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 .homes. John and his friend David Merritt, co-founder and CTO of Watch Duty, decided to create an app to help.
“This came from an idea John had and told me about four years ago,” Merritt says. The edge. “We built the app in 60 days and it was run entirely by volunteers, with no full-time staff. “It was a side project for a lot of engineers, so the goal was to keep it as simple as possible.”
Fire reports are patchy at best in fire-prone areas and are often scattered across platforms like facebook and x, where fire departments and counties have verified pages that share relevant updates. But increasingly, social media platforms put automated access to alert services behind paywalls. Governments also use a wide variety of warning systems, causing delays that can cost lives, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires, which have forced evacuations for more than 180,000 people. And sometimes these government-run alerts are sent in error, causing mass confusion.
Watch Duty simplifies all that for millions of people.
“We view what we're doing as a public service,” Merritt says. “It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely and relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now it is very dispersed. Even the best-intentioned agencies themselves have their hands tied by bureaucracy or contracts. “We partner with government sources with a focus on firefighting.”
“We view what we're doing as a public service.”
One of the biggest problems related to fires, in particular, is that they can spread quickly and consume large areas of land and structures in minutes. For example, the winds that caused the Palisades Fire to spread to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 miles per hour on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the gradual warning system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that cost lives.
“Some of the push notification and text message delivery systems that government agencies use had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for the fire,” Merritt says. “We aim for push notifications to be sent in less than a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in Los Angeles receive push notifications through the app. That's a lot of messages to send in 60 seconds. In general, people understand practically everything at the same time.”
A simple technology stack
For Watch Duty, this type of mass communication requires reliable technology, as well as a group of dedicated staff and trained volunteers. Merritt says Watch Duty relies on several corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its service.
“We aim for push notifications to be sent in less than a minute.”
The app is based on a combination 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 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 reviewed based on quality and not quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for journalists. For example, we never report injuries or give specific directions. Everything is designed with a specific set of criteria. We do not editorialize. We report on what we have heard on the scans.”
According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Although it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit has slowly added more full-time people. “We still have volunteers helping us, but we are increasingly relying on in-house paid staff as we grow, things become more complex, and we have more rigorous processes,” he says.
“All information is examined in terms of quality over quantity.”
It says there are no plans to charge for the app or extract user data. The approach is a kind of field of dreams Method to create a free application that saves people's lives: if you create it well, the financing will come.
“It's the antithesis of what a lot of technology does,” Merritt says. “We don't want you to spend time on the app. You get information and you leave. We have the option to add more photos, but we limit them to those that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. “We don’t want people to wander to their destination.”
Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images
Information gathering in the Trump era
Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from places like the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. Should the incoming Trump administration decide to carry out the threats to dismantle and dissolve the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Servicesuch moves would affect Watch Duty's ability to operate.
Still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be quite insulated from any policy changes,” he says. “Either we are already buying that information ourselves or we are happy to buy it and we will bear that cost. The fact that we will soon cover the entire United States will defray the cost of any changes from a political perspective. Our operating costs are primarily salaries. We're trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. If we need to raise a grant to purchase data from the National Weather Service, we will.”
Regardless of what the next administration does, it is clear that Watch Duty has become a critical and necessary app for those living in Southern California right now. The app currently covers 22 states and plans to roll out nationwide soon.
“We had 1.4 million app downloads in the last few days,” according to Merritt. “I think we've only received 60 support tickets, which shows that something is working there. “We’re really just focused on delivering this information.”
