Duration of unprecedented forest fires in Los Angeles, Watch Duty-A digital platform that provides real-time fire data Reference application to track the development disaster and it is attributed to save innumerable lives. Six months of the fires, the founder and CEO of Watch Duty, John Mills, shares how his small non -profit organization responded in the heat of the crisis and became a reliable source, even for government agencies. As the continuous forest fire season and Texas recover from devastating floods, the history of Watch Duty underlines both our gowing vulnerability to natural disasters driven by climate change and the power of whatrs based on the community, the issues of Sape and Choep.
This is an abbreviated transcription of an interview of Quick responseOrganized by Robert Safian, former editor in chief or Fast company. Of the team behind Scale teacher podcast, Quick response It has sincere conversations with the main business leaders today who sail for real -time challenges. Subscribe to Quick response Wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
As I understand, Watch Duty is not a profit and is an application that brings together information largely from volunteers, right? Of regular people who are monitoring fires? Is it like a community?
Much like that. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia similarly. The difference is that we do it live.
We have around 200 volunteers, around 20 paid employees, about 10 of them are radio operators. But the information really comes from the radio of the Fire Service.
So, after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that it is not a star link in each truck. Communication systems are not very good. Firefighters are in danger, and the only way to listen to what is happening is through them collaborating with each other in real time, through radio.
And then we listen:
“Fire that begins here, burning on this crest.”
“Petrolers and dozens are coming.”
“Holding the line to highway 87”.
“Now the wind is picking up, the fire moves on the crest.”
“It is burning on such and so, the houses are being affected.”
You listen to this live. There is no data source for this. There is no place for this to happen without us. This is how we do what we do.
And this community of volunteers are fire workers? Or some of them are just looking and sharing what they are seeing?
Many of them were firefighters of 30, 40 years, dispatators, types of reporters, sons and daughters of firefighters who grew up in the fire service with the radio chat in the background.
Then it seems that there was a community that was there where you took advantage of. I understand that you had to persuade them a bit to see you as more than a technological type.
That is the beauty of this. We have just seen human behavior and help allow them better. One of the fires I passed through, which was one of the greats in 2020, when the sky got red in northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and Twitter and doing this. Then they were regionalized children. There were some in Bluff Red, someone in Redding, someone in Socal, someone in Sonoma, Napa.
They were doing this independently. They knew each other. They would speak and collaborate a little, but they would not organize together. They remain adverse, they simply did not really spend time collaborating.
Innovation was really [to] Convince them all to work together. [just] A technician. I lived here, like them, in the same danger they did. The key was to convince them that I am here to help. I am part of this community. I am not sitting in my laboratory in Silicon Valley trying to take advantage of its disaster.
And the information they share, the application puts it in a more usable way or in a more accessible way?
Yes, it’s a big question. We do not change their behavior. They always listened to radios and spoke the language of the fire service and put it on Facebook and Twitter. What happens behind the scene is actually many more data. There are many signs, and many of them are very tactical and minor, and we do not want that to come out in the surveillance service. And then they are collaborating in Slack. Everyone is talking and listening.
It is very strange where a person who executes an incident is. There are many people in real -time content edition:
“15 acres that go north-northern. Was 50 or 15?”
“Oh, we shoot, wait for the next transmission, Air Attack is about to be high.”
“We are going to get a size in the fire.”
Then we implement the information in the surveillance service. So, in real time, they are collaborating. Someone has the scam, or control, and the commander of the essential incident of that person.
Then, of the people who are on service or who execute the event at that time, can some of them be volunteers and some may be their staff?
Yes, it is a mixed bag. Like many non -profit organizations, there are staff paid and then volunteers.
And many of our volunteers are now changing their career or have a second race, because first, they contribute and begin to inform, and then become a regional personnel or a regional captain or Brun and help run, Brun and Brun and Brun. And then many of them become full -time employees.
Duning The Fires I saw that the clock duty passed the chatgpt as the application downloaded No. 1. Traffic should really surprise you by surprise, as the fire did.
Yes, he did. Here is the sad part: we have been the number 1 application in the App Store three times. This time it was the sausage, with a lot.
Yes, I mean, Los Angeles’s own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was Buggy. I was sending false alerts. So, it wasn’t just the Los Angeles residents who were using surveillance service, right? They were government officials and firefighters and helicopter pilots. Everyone seemed to be in that.
Yes, the government also uses the duty of surveillance. We are on all large screens and in all emergency operations centers.
We have done something that others house, and it is a usable format. So, whether it is a small old woman or a “hose dragger” or a “brush bunny”, since firefighters refer to them as in wild lands, they all use it and make us come back.
We assumed that the government had all that information and simply hurt us, not for malice, but they are busy, they are trying to fight fire.
It is very granular, the information we share, and then we quickly realize that we receive emails from cistern pilots and diper operators and others tell us that we give them more information than it gives them.
And that was when we realized that this is a much larger company than ever thinking.
It’s strange. Is the success of Watch Duty, I don’t know, an example of government failure or the failure of tax funded technology? Or was there simply no investment in this?
Yes, look, I mean, we work so closely with many of these government organizations and failure abound. It is everywhere. This is how we vote as individuals. It is the other software providers who sold mediocre products. It is the government that has no other options.
There are so many failure points here. It really worsened that day and it was very equipment how necessary we were.
It is difficult to point to guilt to a person or an organization. I know that is what everyone wants is because to blame Boogeyman so we can solve it.
And it is not just climate change, it is a bad forest management. It is as if there are so many things that work in which they are working here. You are doing this problem extraordinarily a bathroom.