A newly expanded app aims to be the emergency alert system the public deserves.

Sara Rubin here, reading real-time updates on various wildfires in California—fortunately, today, none in Monterey County—from an app on my phone. Watch Duty launched last year in a few counties (Sonoma, Lake, Napa and Mendocino) and today rolls out statewide. It’s had some 5,000 new sign-ups in the past 24 hours.

Watch Duty CEO John Mills describes the app as the emergency alert system the public deserves, but that public agencies have not been able to create. People need and want real-time information, and in the absence of a functional public notification tool, they look to fire-watchers on blogs and social media. 

It’s a model we know all too well here in Monterey County. Cal Fire can be impossible to reach, and emergency notifications can be slow and hard to decipher. Instead, many rely on people who live in fire-prone areas and who provide real-time updates, like Kate Novoa, aka Big Sur Kate, who has been blogging since 2008. She has become the closest thing to an official information source for all emergency- and evacuation-related news in Big Sur, with people providing photos of smoke and reporting what look like wildfires even before there’s an official announcement out. 

And Novoa is part of Watch Duty’s expanded number of fire reporters, so far its only contributor from Monterey County. 

The idea behind the app is to rely not just on slow government officials, but on scanner-listeners and fire watchers like Novoa, people who are trusted to provide credible and meaningful information. Contributors to the app must adhere to a code of conduct that prohibits them from publishing hearsay or speculation, and to correct anything they publish in error. 

A big part of what Watch Duty has done to date is entice fire watchers like Novoa to participate, and post on Watch Duty instead of (or in addition to) their own sites. “The hardest part was to convince everybody that we weren’t trying to build a company to make money, we were trying to solve a problem that they were all trying to solve on their own,” Miller says.

It’s critical to rely on people, not technology, he says, when it comes to interpreting and reporting out meaningful information. “We are not trying to replace humanity with robot BS,” he says. “This is humans who live here, it is not something that can be done by machine.”

The app relies on real people (like Novoa and her counterparts elsewhere), as well as bots that read scanners and 911 feeds, then alert real humans who interpret what they’re seeing. It’s a collaborative effort, with a lot of discussion on Slack. “Move fast and break things is a Silicon Valley mantra that really doesn’t work when you’re dealing with people’s lives and safety,” Mills says. 

Mills has a background in software, and moved during the pandemic from San Francisco to Sonoma County. He quickly got schooled on the harsh realities of life in fire country, and he dove deep into learning—he went on ride-alongs and did wildland firefighting training. 

“I realized there was not much intelligence,” he says. “Rather than 45 minutes after a fire starts and you are told to leave and it’s like, ‘Oh shoot, I didn’t even know there was a fire,’ I prefer to arm citizens with information.”

Since launching in a handful of counties last August, Mills says there’s already been real-time impact. Schools and hospitals have decided to evacuate based on information on Watch Duty, and someone brought a bulldozer to a neighbor’s property to save it. 

Mills expects to scale up on coverage area and number of contributors. He plans to eventually create a training program for participants who might be less established than people like Novoa, with years of experience, and they want to create redundancy—sometimes it’s the bloggers who must evacuate first. 

Mills also says he doesn’t need to earn money on the app—the 40-year-old has already done well enough in business, he says—so it’s a nonprofit model. To be sustainable, the organization will sell data, but it will always remain free to use. And once it is perfected in California for fires, he envisions scaling up to fill the void of emergency communications everywhere, for all types of emergencies, from fires to floods and hurricanes.

“We’re trying to solve the disaster alert system,” he says. 

It’s something the public sector should’ve figured out a long time ago, but didn’t. In that absence, Watch Duty may be able to save people’s lives and property. I’ll be watching to see how it goes. 

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