During the unprecedented forest fires in Los Angeles, you must follow the Duty-a digital platform that offers real-time burn data for keeping track of the unfolding disaster and is credited with saving countless lives. Six months after the fires, the founder and CEO of Watch Duty, John Mills, how his little non -profit responded in the heat of the crisis and became a trusted source – even for government agencies. While the wildfire season is raging and Texas restores from devastating floods, the story of Watch Duty underlines both our growing vulnerability for natural disasters that are driven by climate change and the power of community -based solutions to keep us safe and connected when it matters most.
This is a short transcript of an interview from Quick responseOrganized by Robert Safian, former editor -in -chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale Podcast, Rapid Response offers candid conversations with the best managers of today through real -time challenges. Subscribe to a quick response where you get your podcasts to ensure that you never miss an episode.
As I understand, Watch Duty is a non -profit and it is an app that largely collects information from volunteers, right? From ordinary people who follow fires? Is it like a community?
Really bad. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is that we do it live.
We have around 200 volunteers, around 20 paid staff, around 10 of which are radio operators themselves. But the information really comes from Fire Service Radio.
So after getting through a few disasters, you realize that there is no star link in every truck. The communication systems are not very good. The firefighters are in danger, and the only way to hear what is actually going on is through those who work together in real time, via the radio.
And so we hear:
“Fire starts here, burning about this ridge.”
“Tankers and dozers are coming.”
“Hold the line to Highway 87.”
“Now the wind picks up, the fire is spreading over the ridge.”
“It burns so-and-so, houses are influenced.”
You hear this live. There is no data source for this. There is no place to make this happen without us. So that’s how we do what we do.
And this community of volunteers are they fire workers? Or do some of them just look and share what they see?
Many of them were 30, 40-year-old wildland fire winkers, dispatchers, reporter types, sons and daughters of firefighters who grew up in the fire brigade with the radio chat in the background.
So it sounds like there was a community that you were grabbing. I understand that you had to convince them a bit to see you as more than just a tech man.
That is the great thing about this. We just saw human behavior and helped them to do better. One of the fires that I went through, one of the great ones in 2020, when the air turned red in North California, I saw them on Facebook and Twitter already did this. So they were a bit regionalized. There was someone in Red Bluff, someone in salvation, someone in social, someone in Sonoma, Napa.
They did this independently. They knew each other. They would talk and work a bit together, but they would not organize themselves together. They were not opponent, they just didn’t spent time working together.
The innovation was real [to] all convince them to work together – that I wasn’t [just] A TECHEREUME. That I lived here, like she, in the same danger they were doing. The key was to convince them that I am here to help. I am part of this community. I am not in my laboratory in Silicon Valley and try to take advantage of your disaster.
And the information they share, does the app place it in a more useful form or a more accessible form?
Yes, it’s a great question. We have not changed their behavior. They always listened to radios and spoke the language of the fire brigade and put them on Facebook and Twitter. What happens behind the scenes is actually much more data. Many signals come in, and much of them is very tactical and small, and we don’t want that to be aware. And so they work together in Slack. They all talk and listen.
It is very rare where one person runs an incident. There are many people in real -time editing of content:
“15 hectares on the way to Northern Northwest. Was it 50 or 15?”
“Oh shoot, let’s wait for the next transmission, Air Attack is about to be overhead.”
“We’re going to get a size on the fire.”
We then implement the information about Watch Duty. So in real time they work together. Someone has the scammer, or control, and the essentially incident commander of that person.
So of the people who are currently serving or performing the event, some of them can be volunteers and some of them may be your staff people?
Yes, it’s a mixed bag. Like many non -profit organizations, there is paid staff and then there are volunteers.
And many of our volunteers are now changing career or have a second career, because they first contribute and listen, and then they start reporting, and then they become a staff reporter or a regional leader in the area and they help certain parts of a state or a region to work together and work together. And then many of them actually become full -time employees.
During the fires I saw that Watch Duty Chatgpt passed as the number 1 downloaded app. You must have surprised the traffic, just like the fire.
Yes, it did. Here is the sad part: we have been the number 1 app in the App Store three times. This time was by far the worst.
Yes, I mean, La’s own emergency alarm system, there was one, but it was buggy. It sent false reports. So it was not only La -residents who used watchlight, right? They were government officials and firefighters and the helicopter pilots. Everyone seemed to be on it.
Yes, the government also uses Watcheduty. We have all the large screens and all emergency control centers.
We have done something that others have not been able to crack, and it is a useful size. So whether you are a small old lady or a “snake dragger” or a “brush rabbit”, as firefighters refer to themselves like in the natural country, they use it all and it has done something that we didn’t see.
We assumed that the government had all that information and they just didn’t tell us, not out of malice, but they are busy, they try to fight fire.
It is very detailed, the information we share, and then we quickly realize that we receive e -mails from fuel pilots and perpetrator operators and others who tell us that we are giving them more information than overhead.
And then we really realized that this is a much larger company than we had ever thought possible.
It’s strange. Is the success of the Watch Duty, I don’t know, an example of the failure of the government or the failure of tax -financed technology? Or was there just no investment in this?
Yes, look, I mean, we work so closely with many of these government organizations and there is a failure in abundance. It’s everywhere. It is how we as individuals voted. It is the other software suppliers who sold matte products. It is the government that has no other options.
There are so many failures here. It just worsened that day and it was very clear how necessary we were.
It is difficult to just blame one person or one org. I know that is what everyone wants is that they want to blame the boogeyman so that we can repair it.
And it’s not just climate change, it’s bad forest management. It is as if there are so many things that all work against us here. It makes this problem extremely bad.
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