Crypto News: MapLab: The app changing how the US tracks wildfires

This summer, record-breaking heat and built-up vegetation have turned California into a tinderbox. Started by an alleged act of arson near the city of Chico on July 24, the Park Fire quadrupled within a few days and has now consumed nearly 400,000 acres, making it the fifth-largest wildfire in state history. Other fires have burned more than 300,000 acres in total across California as of this weekend, putting thousands of residents under evacuation order.

For John Mills, the CEO and co-founder of Watch Duty, a wildfire tracking app, the situation is harrowing. But it's also a chance to help. Launched in 2021 as a nonprofit organization, Watch Duty maps wildfires burning across 13 US states, including California, and disseminates public safety information using a team of trained and vetted volunteers.

The Park Fire is shown on Watch Duty on July 30, including an alert about a level three evacuation order tied to the fire. Screenshot: Watch Duty

This year's explosive wildfire activity has led to "astronomical" growth for the app says Mills, whose background is in software engineering and entrepreneurship; it's currently the third most popular news app for iPhone and has close to 1 million daily active users. MapLab's Laura Bliss spoke with Mills about the story behind the app, how it has helped residents and responders navigate wildfires and his plans for the future. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did the idea for Watch Duty come about?

When I bought an off-the-grid ranch in Sonoma County in 2019, I knew I was moving to fire country, but didn't know what to expect. The next month, there was a fire on my neighbor's property on the ridge right above me. Helicopters are flying around my house, making circles. But there's no alert, no notification, no sirens, nothing. So I'm wetting my house down, but I'm not leaving. A couple seconds later, a huge C-130 flies right over my house, and I can see the doors open and drop retardant on my neighbor's property. That's when I was like, holy crap, what is happening here? That tanker left. Helicopters are gone. The fire's out. But again, there's no alert, no news report, no media, zero. And I am scared shitless.

So I started preparing myself by doing some wildland fire training. I put rooftop sprinklers on my house. Then the Walbridge fire came in 2020, and that got me to evacuate. I went to my friend's place in Santa Rosa and I was staying up day and night, trying to figure out where the intelligence was. Where is the fire? Where's it going? Where is the fire line? So that's where this is all born: out of a lot of quiet times where there was no intel coming out.

An update from one of Watch Duty's volunteers on a fire burning in Montana on July 30. Screenshot: Watch Duty

There are other resources people turn to for information about wildfires, like CalFire and InciWeb. But Watch Duty is different in that it also gives more details about things like the direction of the fire, resources dispatched to it and evacuation orders. Some of this information you're getting by listening into firefighting crews using radio scanners. Why do you think an app like this didn't exist before?

Because there is no existing data in many of these cases. It comes off the radio. If you do not have people listening, you are not going to get the full truth. So it just couldn't exist until someone solved this problem. We have volunteers who were already doing this on behalf of their neighbors. We just empowered them.

Who are those volunteers?

We have about 150 volunteers, 40 of whom have credentials to post on Watch Duty. They all go through background checks and rigorous training. A lot of these folks have either been a firefighter, been a dispatcher on a fire or a son or daughter of a firefighter who grew up with the radio on in the background. These people are embedded in their communities, and they're based all over the place: Northern part of the state, southern part of the state, Washington, Oregon, everywhere.

I'll give the example of two guys on our team. One is in Arizona, the other one is in Nevada. Both those men have 35 and 41 years respectively of working in wildland fires [in California] and they retired. All their friends find out, oh, you're the fire guy. So when there's a fire in the area, their phone starts ringing, people asking them for advice. They said, you know what, I'm gonna make a Facebook page with all the information so I don't get 50 text messages. Next thing you know, they have 75,000 followers. These are retired men who fought fire all their lives and are now finding a second life, continuing their work.

And they've been doing the same work because every area is having the same problem. Public information officers can't keep up. People want more information quicker. We know we can find it. And they've been doing this well before Watch Duty's existence. I'm just the one who banded them all together to make this happen.

You've grown really quickly. How has word spread?

We built a free application that ended up getting used by citizens who were also volunteer firefighters who brought that up the chain. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now I go into emergency operation centers and I see us right up there on the screen. We've had growth every year, and year after year, we expand our territory. Our purview is much larger than just California. But here, well before the Park fire, we were having explosive amounts of fire spread very quickly. So growth has been astronomical.

Fires are shown burning across Oregon, Washington and Idaho as of July 30. Screenshot: Watch Duty

Do you know of any examples where people used the app to make different decisions in a risky situation than they might have otherwise?

Oh yeah. I get emails from tanker pilots who tell me that they have more intel than they've ever had walking into their $30 million aircraft. I have individuals who tell me they're driving down the road looking at their house burning in the rear view mirror, and the government alert goes out but they're out 45 minutes before that.

What's next for Watch Duty?

We're building a professional version which will be out here later this summer, building more features for clients like utilities and telcos that use the app in their operation centers. We're also talking about dealing with floods. [With natural disasters], a bunch of them have similar problems: not enough information. We have a lot of human intelligence and people who care about this problem, so we will definitely be looking into more disasters.