The fast-moving wildfires in Los Angeles, California, the United States of America, has resulted in a surge of downloads for Watch Duty, a free app developed by a non-profit organisation that gives users real-time alerts about fires in their areas as well as information about the latest evacuation zones.
The app has gained more than 1.6 million new users over the past few days with most of the recent sign-ups coming from the LA County area. It is now Apple’s most downloaded free iOS app, and is considered to be one of the most trusted sources of information about the wildfires by residents and emergency responders alike.
Besides real-time alerts, Watch Duty also has maps that display vital information such as danger zones, active fire perimeters, evacuation warnings, and power outages.
Through Watch Duty’s app and website, users are able to track the activities of firefighting crews as well as receive air-quality alerts and official evacuation orders. Additional features such as flight tracking for firefighting aircraft are available at a subscription fee of $25 (Rs 2,147 approx.).
Watch Duty was launched in 2021 by John Mills, a Silicon Valley start-up founder who identified a critical gap in accessing reliable, centralised information about the wildfires that year.
“I spent day and night for eight days just up all night listening to radios, digging through the internet, and just realized this was a broken, broken problem. […] And a lot of the people who got me through that fire are actually now employees of my company,” Mills was quoted as saying by Gizmodo.
Currently, Watch Duty is staffed with 12 paid employees and over 250 volunteers, some of whom are retired firefighters or other public safety professionals, according to a report by Washington Post.
The app helps users make sense of what is happening and what they should do by compiling information from various official sources such as law enforcement news briefings and video camera feeds of fires. Volunteers also keep track of public safety radio communications, the report said.
“We’re in every single firefighter’s pocket,” Nick Russell, the vice president of operations at Watch Duty, was quoted as saying.
“Not enough credit goes to our engineering crew. […] They’ve been online 24/7, scaling up our systems since the fires began,” he said.
The company reportedly plans on offering real-time information pertaining to other natural disasters such as floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards or extreme heat.
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