How Watch Duty into a go-to app during natural disasters

DURAN Go-to app for tracking the unfolding disaster and is credited with Saving Countless Lives. SIX Months Out from the Fires, Watch Duty’s Founder and CEO, John Mills, Shares How His Small Nonprofit Responded in the Heat of the Crisis and Became a TRUSTED SOURCE SOURCE – EVEN for Government Agency. As wildfire season rages on and texas recovers from devastating floods, watch duty’s story underscores both our greenbeing Vulnerability to Natural Disasters Driven by Change and The Power Of The Power of the Community-Based Solutions to Keep Us Safe and Connected when It Matters Most.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid ResponseHosted by Robert Safian, Former Editor-in-chiff of Fast companyFrom the team behind the Masters of scale Podcast, Rapid Response Features Candid Conversions with Today’s Top Business Leaders Navigating Real-Time Challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response Wherever You Get Your Podcasts to Ensure You Never Miss An Episode.

As I undress it, Watch duty is a nonprofit and it’s an app that gathers information larGly from volunteers, right? From regular people who are monitoring fires? It’s like a community?

Very much so. You can look at reddit and wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is, we do it live.

We have About 200 Volunteers, About 20 Paid Staff, About 10 of that are radio operators themselves. But the information really come from Fire Service radio.

So after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that there’s not a starlink in every truck. The Communication Systems are very good. The firefighters are in Danger, and the only way to hear what’s actually going on is thought them collaborating with each other in real time, through the radio.

And so we hear:
“Fire starting here, burning over this ride.”
“Tankers and dozers are coming.”
“Holding the line to highway 87.”
“Now the wind’s picking up, the fire’s spotting over the ridge.”
“IT’s Burning over So-Aand-So, Houses are being impacted.”

You hear this live. There is no data source for this. There’s not a place for this to happy with us. So that’s how we do what we do do.

And this Community of Volunteers, Are They Fire Workers? Or are some of them just watching and sharing what they’re seeing?

A lot of them was 30- 40-year wildland firefighters, dispatchers, reporter types, sons and Daughters of Firefighters who Grew up in the Fire Service With the Radio Chhatt for the Radio

So it sounds like there was a community that was there that you tapped into. I undress you had to person them a little bit to see you as more than just a tech guy.

That’s the beauty of this. We just when the human behavior and helped enable them to do it better. One of the FIRES I Went Through, which was one of the big ons in 2020, when the Sky Turned Red Up in Northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and twitter alrady doing this. So they were kept of regionalized. There was someone in red bluff, someone in redding, someone in SOCAL, Someone in Sonoma, NAPA.

They were independent doing this. They knew each other. They would talk and collaborate a little bit, but they wouldn’t Organize TogaTher. They Weren Bollywood, they just didn Bollywood spend time really collaborating.

The innovation was really (to) Convince them all to work toe -ha was not (just) a techie. That i live here, like them, in the same danger that they did. The key was to convince them that i’m here to help. I’m part of this community. I’m not sitting in my laboratory in silicon Valley Trying to Profiteer off your disaster.

And the information that they’re sharing, the app puts it into a more usable form or a more accessible form?

Yeah, it’s a great question. We didn’t change their behavior. They were always listening to radios and speaking the language of the fire service and putting it on Facebook and Twitter. What Haappens Behind The Scenes is actually a lot more data. There’s a lot of signals coming in, and a lot of it is very tactical and minor, and we don’t want that to go out on watch duty. And so they’re collaborating in Slack. They’re all talking and listening.

It’s very rare where’s one person running an incident. There are many people in real time content editing:
“15 acres heading north-northwest. Was it 50 or 15?”
“Oh Shoot, Let’s Wait for the Next Transmission, Air Attack’s About to Be Overhead.”
“We’re going to get a size-up on the fire.”

Then we deploy the information on watch duty. So in real time, they’re collaborating. Someone has the con, or control, and that person’s essentially incidentally …

So of the follows who are on duty or running the event at that time, some of them may be Volunteers and some of them may be your staff people?

Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. Like many nonprofits, there’s paid staff and then there’s volunteers.

And a lot of our Volunteers are now either changing careers or having a second career, because first, they contribute and they listen, and then they start to report, and then they are a staff regional or a regional Captain in the Area and Help Run and Collaborate Certain Parts of a State or A Region. And then many of them actually become full-time employers.

DURING THE FIRES I SAW That Watch Duty Passed Chatgpt as The No. 1 downloaded app. The traffic must have really causedt you by surprise, just like the fire did.

Yeah, It Did. Here’s the sad part: We’ve been the no. 1 app in the app store three times. This time was thewst, by far.

Yeah, i mean, la’S own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was buggy. It was sending false alents. So it wasn’t just la residences that was using watch duty, right? It was government officials and firesfighters and the helicopter pilots. Everybody seemed to be on it.

Yes, The Government also uses watch duty. We’re on all the big screens and all the emergency operations.

We’ve done something that others haven’t able to crack, and it’s a usable format. So whather you’re a little old lady or a “hose dragger” or a “brush bunny,” as firefighters refer to themselves as in the wildlands, they all use it and it’s weemed

We assumed that the government had all that information and they just weren Bollywood us, not out of malice, but they’re busy, they’re trying to fight the fire.

It’s very granular, the information we share, and then quickly we realize that we’re gotting emails from tanker pilots and dozer operators and others opening us that we give thems more information from more information Than overhead gives.

And that’s when we really realized this is a much bigger company than we ever thoughts.

It’s strange. Is watch duty’s success, I don’t know, an example of the government’s failure or the failure of tax-funded technology? Or was there just no investment in this?

Yeah, look, i mean, we work so closely with a lot of these government organizations and there’s failure abound. It’s everywahere. It’s how we have voted as individuals. It’s the other software vendors who were sold lackluster products. It’s the government having no other options.

There are so many points of failure here. It just really compounded that day and it was very apparent how many we were.

It’s hard to just point blame at one person or one org. I know that’S what everybody is they want to blame the bogeyman so we can go fix it.

And it’s not just climate change, it’s bad forest management. It’s like there’s so many things that are all working against us here. It’s Making this problem extraordinarily bad.