Trying to stay safe during a forest fire? There is an app that can help

As climate change leads to longer wildfire seasons and increases the likelihood of destructive fires, more people in western states are seeking local wildfire information. But finding accurate, specific and timely information can be challenging, especially in the middle of an emergency.

“The world has now come to expect Twitters, TikToks and push notifications, and the world of technology has passed this community of first responders, firefighters and emergency managers by,” says John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Security guard dutyan app launched in 2021 that is growing in popularity as more people search for wildfire information on their phones.

“It’s really starting to explode as the fires explode,” said Mills, whose app saw one Increase in downloads At the beginning of September, three major fires raged in the mountains around Los Angeles. “The sad thing is that when that happens, things really get extraordinarily bad.”

A flood of information

During a wildfire, this information can come from many sources: emergency push notifications from county emergency managers, text messages and emails from the sheriff’s department, social media posts from local, state and federal fire departments, and websites such as Inciwebmap the fire lines.

Mills, a Silicon Valley engineer who lives off the grid in the woods of Sonoma County, experienced this confusion of information after a violent encounter with the Wallbridge fire in 2020 – part of a particularly bad summer of wildfires on the West Coast in which 33 people were just killed in California. Mills realized, “You know, it’s just a matter of time before it comes back for me.”

He realized he could do something about it – by developing an app that would integrate all of these wildfire information sources and make them easily accessible on smartphones.

“Hey, I live in the woods, I’m going to die, this has to go on the market tomorrow,” Mills remembers thinking during the wildfire. “So we built Watch Duty in 80 days, went live, and had 50,000 users in a week.”

The app started relatively small, tracking fires in just three counties in Northern California, but within four years it grew to cover the entire American West, Texas and Oklahoma.

New technology, old techniques

Watch Duty does not collect or sell user data. The basic version is free to download, and the nonprofit that produces it is funded through donations and subscriptions to the advanced and pro versions.

The app draws on information from various official sources on forest fires.

But its strength relies on a small army of volunteers and reporters with experience in firefighting, emergency response and journalism who watch live streams from wilderness cameras and listen in on radio traffic from firefighters on the scene.

Michael Silvester is one of those contributors – a staff reporter who started as a volunteer. He often works the night shift and posts live updates on active fires from his home across the Pacific, where he started as a radio scanner at a young age.

“My dad was a volunteer firefighter here in New Zealand,” he says. “I used that to keep an eye on him on calls and other things.”

Silvester says one day he became curious and wanted to see how much he could learn about wildfires in California, a whole hemisphere away, just by listening to live streams of fire radio stations online. It turns out a lot – and his Twitter handle @CAFireScanner was born.

“Someone said I saved their lives one day,” Silvester says quietly. “They didn’t know there was going to be a fire over the hill until they saw the news on Twitter.”

Now he’s doing the same service at Watch Duty, which he says is a better platform for getting the right information into the right hands.

“If you follow people like me on Twitter, you must somehow get everything I post. Will there be a fire in Southern California? “Is there going to be a fire on the other side of the state in Siskiyou County?” he describes.

“Watch Duty allows you to sign up by county. This is targeted information – it will be delivered to you.”

“This is a real-time operation, 24 hours a day,” says CEO Mills. “We’re talking to you about an app; We talk to you through your phones. But in reality we listen to radio, a 100-year-old technology,” he explains. “You really get the most up-to-date information there in real time. Because in this moment, it’s actually the firefighters doing their job.”

An “amazing tool” as part of a toolbox

“Watch Duty has definitely filled a gap,” says Karen Hancock, public information officer and community outreach specialist for the Sonoma County Fire District, one of the first counties covered by the app when it launched in 2021.

“It has been an amazing tool not only for our public, but also for our firefighters and crews,” she said.

Hancock’s community is no stranger to wildfires. In 2017, the fast-spreading Tubbs Fire swept through the Coffey Park neighborhood in the middle of the night without warning, killing 22 people and burning over 5,000 buildings. That was it then most devastating fire in California’s history, but it soon became the second most destructive after the Campfire rampaged through the town of Paradise a year later.

“We learned that redundancy is really important,” Hancock says. Its mission is to help community members stay up to date with the latest information. “But a lot of times we’re on the field and we just can’t get it out fast enough because our hands are just so busy at that moment.”

CalFire, the California wildfire agency, warns that there are “potential risks associated with the unintentional sharing of inaccurate information.” In a statement to NPR, CalFire said they are prioritizing people Visit their website for information and that platforms such as Watch Duty “should not be viewed as official sources of information.”

Hancock says she always recommends Watch Duty alongside more traditional sources of information like local emergency notifications. “It’s just another tool, another way to disseminate information,” she emphasizes.

“There’s not that many of us first responders and even a smaller handful of us that are able to get those messages out, you know, through social media or just those critical alerts,” Hancock explains. “Having another resource that reaches so many in the community – that’s life-saving.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. For more information, visit npr.org.