This year's hottest app is a wildfire tracker

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(Bloomberg) –The wildfire didn’t burn Lisa Rice’s home, but it huffed it full of smoke and soot, and melted the seals on the windows and doors. Nearly four years later, she’s still agitated during fire season, which spans roughly half of the year where she lives in Boulder, Colorado.

“One of the biggest things is the emotional — the PTSD — part of it,” she explains. “When it gets windy and you can smell smoke, I do kind of get on edge quickly.”

Therapy has helped a little, but in July, Rice found a better antidote on her iPhone: a digital platform for tracking wildfires called Watch Duty. The app maps fire perimeters, streams live feeds from wildfire cameras and monitors wind direction, air quality, power outages and evacuation notices, all key pieces of info for the fire concerned. 

Rice, a realtor, pulls up the site over and over throughout the day. She toggles through maps of her neighborhood to make sure fire hasn’t sparked, then swipes up to Oregon and Washington where her sister and parents live, before scanning the rest of northern Colorado. If flames are near a home she helped buy or sell, she reaches out to her former clients. It’s a niche form of doomscrolling. But for Rice and millions like her, it’s a chance to get a jump on disaster if it comes their way. 

“The peace of mind it has given me is huge,” she says.

As of Monday, nearly 11,000 firefighters are battling dozens of large blazes in the US, and the country is currently on the highest wildfire alert level. That’s led millions in search of up-to-date fire information, and they’re increasingly tuned into Watch Duty and a host of other digital platforms. 

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“We have a lot of people who compare it to a TikTok addiction,” says John Mills, Watch Duty’s founder. “We have firefighters and friends who say ‘I’m on there every morning; I’m hooked on it.'” 

Watch Duty has emerged as a leader among scads of apps and online platforms for tracking fire. Like many digital fire trackers, it distills a cacophony of emergency communications, but it also has dozens of people listening to those feeds and reporting what they mean for those in harm’s way.

Consequently, Watch Duty has amassed about 2.8 million downloads since its 2021 launch, blowing up thanks to evangelists like Rice. For a brief moment this summer, it was No. 1 on Apple’s list of free apps, ahead of ChatGPT, Google and TikTok.

Wildfire doesn’t recognize government boundaries, and emergency personnel take a collective approach to battling it. Federal, state, county and municipal firefighters work shoulder to shoulder. But while they fight fire together, this motley crew puts out a hodge-podge of forecasts across a tangle of social media feeds, sometimes confusing a public hungry for life- and property-saving information. 

Many of PG&E Corp.’s 16 million customers in California live in fire country. “It’s a massive challenge to keep everybody notified in a real-time situation,” explains Andrew Abranches, the company’s senior director of wildfire preparedness and operations. “What Watch Duty has done is basically democratized that information.”

Its timing is propitious. More land is susceptible to wildfire, and there are far more people living in those areas. 

According to the University of Wisconsin, almost one-third of US land is in the so-called wildland-urban interface and thus susceptible to forest fires, up from 29.5% in 1990. Meanwhile, people are spreading out; some 44 million US homes are now under threat from fire, up from 30 million in 1990, the data shows. Climate change is making those 72,000 communities more tenuous.

When the East Troublesome Fire threatened her cabin near Granby, Colorado, in October 2020, Reola Phelps turned on all her sprinklers, evacuated and spent the next six days cycling through a stack of browser tabs. Every evening, she’d log on for a Facebook town hall meeting of sorts hosted by the county authorities. 

On October 21, the outlook was worrisome but hopeful; Phelps shut down her computer assuming the cabin her two sons and their friends had built by hand was safe. An hour later, the only trace of it was a pile of ash streaked with veins of melted aluminum. 

“We just wanted better information,” Phelps explains. “It just didn’t feel like it was enough.”

 Around the same time, Watch Duty’s Mills had a similar experience — albeit with a less disastrous outcome. A Silicon Valley software veteran, he had decamped to an off-grid property in Sonoma County in 2019. The following summer, Mills was surprised by a massive airtanker buzzing overhead to drop flame retardant nearby. 

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The experience drove him down an internet rabbit hole, digging through layers of disaster warnings and federal data to approximate his fire risk. He had his apps for weather, food delivery and social media, but there was no one-stop digital shop for wildfire. 

Ultimately, Mills found a handful of Facebook feeds run by so-called fire scanners, people who tune into the radio chatter of disparate firefighting units and essentially live blog what they hear. “These folks had taken it upon themselves to solve this issue,” Mills says. That inspired him to launch Watch Duty as a nonprofit and set out to build a better, broader version of what he tapped into on Facebook.

Today, Watch Duty spans 13 US states and has some 100 reporters posting updates on nearly every major blaze in the American West. Six reporters are paid, while the rest are an array of volunteers, many who were doing similar work already via their own social media feeds or who left careers dealing with wildfires. In addition to information from various public data sources ranging from the National Weather Service to utilities, the app’s reporters also provide insights into what fire crews are doing and saying.

About a year ago, Watch Duty added tracking for prescribed burns — prophylactic blazes intended to mitigate future fires — since such events might spook residents who didn’t know they were planned. And for $25 a year, Watch Duty lets subscribers track the airplanes and helicopters fighting wildfires. Last month, the nonprofit launched a “pro” membership geared toward government agencies, utilities, insurance companies and others that have considered its service imperative.

“We want to be the single pane of glass where everyone gets this information,” Mills says.

PG&E was one of the first to sign up, but the app was already critical for the utility. Abranches said the company habitually checks Watch Duty before dispatching crews for routine work to make sure they won’t be caught in a dangerous situation.

Less formally, Abranches has convinced about 4,000 PG&E employees to sign up for Watch Duty, flag the homes of their friends and family and set up a warning system. Ultimately, the digital chain encourages residents to evacuate sooner than they might have otherwise. 

Firefighting “crews prioritize people first, so if people aren’t there, a fire suppression agency can start structure defense sooner,” he explains. “It’s absolutely saving lives in a massive way.”

Watch Duty would have been hard to scale using the Silicon Valley playbook. For one, Mills’ North Star is helping people, not investors, and the organization’s nonprofit status has proven useful in securing government partners and certain data feeds.

Second, Watch Duty’s secret sauce isn’t AI or some clever trick of coding or audience building; it runs on humans laboriously hoovering up garbled sources of information and spitting it out into super-localized updates. 

Watch Duty has competitors such as Firespot, a similar app that largely relies on public data. It’s about to launch an update that adds infrared satellite feeds that pick up wildfires regardless of weather conditions, said creator Tyler Rayner. Still, he concedes that Watch Duty’s corps of reporters is a competitive moat. 

“When there is an active fire,” Rayner says, “people just want that immediate one-to-one of people telling them what’s going on.”

Mills occasionally meets with investors focused on climate opportunities, and they often tell him his endeavor doesn’t have enough “TAM” — or total addressable market — to be worthwhile. It’s a valid point. Most people don’t pay much attention to a wildfire until it threatens their property or turns the sky into a creamsicle haze. 

That said, people are moving to fire country — or had climate change move fire country to them. 

Watch Duty can provide information and turn dread into action for the millions in the danger zone, but Mills is already thinking about the many millions more exposed to floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters. Hurricanes Milton and Helene were reminders of how quickly disaster can strike and the gaping holes in emergency communication. 

In a warming world, a Watch Duty that more broadly tracks cataclysm and volatile weather would ostensibly be busier than ever. “We’re slowly moving East,” Mills said. “When people have to migrate because of something happening, that’s where we want to get involved.”

To contact the author of this story:
Kyle Stock in Denver at kstock6@bloomberg.net