As Los Angeles province continues to revive chaos, the application tracking of fires run by the non -profit Gulf region is gaining.
Watch Duty, which was launched in 2021, combines accident maps available to the public, evacuation and warning areas-like what can be found on Cal Fire-with shelter sites, national weather service alerts, text texts, actual time updates, with an option to receive or stop notifications about specific coordinates.
Watch Duty, which calculated 7.2 million annual active users at the end of 2024, has already added 600,000 new users in the past 24 hours, according to CEO John Mills.
“What is happening now in Los Angeles is the worst I have seen in the five years I was doing this … this is catastrophic,” Mills told the Times. ))
What is the application of the hour of the clock?
The app provides real -time updates on fires 22 countriesIncluding California. Watch Duty has 15 employees and works with nearly 200 volunteers, including active and retired firefighters.
The Watch Duty team gets automatic alerts that are sent to the Slack platform when a 911 call is made regarding a fire. The team monitors information about the fire, listening to radio lights, looking at wildlife and satellite cameras and following official advertisements of law enforcement services, firefighting services and other public sources, according to what they mentioned Watch the service site. Watch Duty said it would notify the affected audiences by applying it “if we see a threat to life or property.”
As of Wednesday morning, for example, users who follow a Palisades fire can find messages from the Watch Duty Cole Euken correspondent in the eastern range of fire and see a current picture looking from Topanga Peak West.
Who is behind the duty to observe?
The app is run by Santa Rosa’s non -profit service, which was called the forest where Robin Hood wanders.
Mills, who leads Sherwood, spent his career in Silicon Valley, and sold a food service software in 2022.
In 2020, Mills decided to move to the forest in Sonoma Province. In his first month there, he saw aircraft and helicopters flying over his home, as his neighbor’s farm was burning. Mills said he had not received a warning or warning. During the 2020 Walbridge Fire fire, which ended in the angle of his property, Mills said that he continued people who set up pages on social media such as Facebook to notify others of what was happening with fires in their societies.
What if there is a way to allow such publications more widely, Mills asked himself. He began to imagine an application that would serve as “loudspeakers” to spread information to his community and create the observation duty, which was launched in 2021. Some people who watched the fires joined Mills in his efforts to build the application, and when they told their fans about this, the popularity of the duty to watch.
“It started with me to convince them that I was not like Silicon Valley.” It took me some time to make everyone trust me. ”
The Supervisory duty was available for the first time in Sonoma, Lake and Naba provinces. Watch the witness’s duty alerts about the evacuation of schools and hospitals during the cache, App helped grow to 50,000 users in its first week. “It has just exploded from there and has been a height in the meteorite since then,” Mills said.
How is the monitoring duty to be funded?
Watch Duty is free and said it does not intend to sell personal information on its users to any external third parties.
If users want additional advantages, they can buy a membership starting from $ 24.99, which includes alerts for more than four provinces at one time and tracker Fire aircraft. The application also accepts donations.
Mills said that the observation duty raised two million dollars of membership dues, another $ 600,000 of donations and a total grant of $ 3 million, including one of Google.org.
What is the next of the observation duty?
The application plans to expand the types of disasters it monitors, starting with floods in the next month or two months. In the future, Watch Duty hopes to explore the use of other types of data, such as river standards, tsunami and earthquakes.
“This has become a way of life for us, and how we fight fire and survive through natural disasters,” Mills said.
He is not planning to leave his home in the forest, even as fires grow in California.
“I don’t leave. I had a choice – I can fight or run, and after five years, I still enjoy fighting,” Mills said.
Matt Brennan, Deputy Editor -in -Chief of the Times for Entertainment and Arts, contributed to this report.