Watch Duty For Fire Awareness, by Josh Leone
Our guest speaker for August 8, 2024, was Josh Leone, a member of the founding team and reporter with Watch Duty, a fire awareness non-profit focused on disseminating fire-related public safety information in real time from verified sources. Josh is a 3rd generation resident of the Russian River area and is well known for his reporting on fires, floods, and other disasters. He’s sometimes known as the “Fire Mayor of Guerneville.”
Watch Duty’s mission is to provide a fast, comprehensive, and actionable source of reliable information for civilians and first responders. As we in Sonoma County know so well, wildfires are a huge problem and getting worse. 32% of Americans live in an area of significant wildfire risk and 21.8 million Americans live within 3 miles of a large wildfire. Five out of the biggest 10 wildfires in the country occurred in the last 10 years. Yet we have very little reliable real-time information about wildfires as they occur, largely because first responder tech infrastructure was not built for the fast flow of information. Watch Duty was designed to fix that problem. It now has 5 million users in 13 states (doubling since the Park Fire). Watch Duty is also working to include hurricane and tornado information on its app. The key pillars of Watch Duty are data capture, validation, and notification. Watch Duty prides itself on knowing about fires as soon as, if not before, first responders! Fire data is obtained from online sources, reporters themselves listening to reports, and connections in the background. The information is validated with a variety of sources and then, if significant, an alert is pushed out in the app. They have someone watching the entire county 24-7. Notifications always go out when an Air Attack plane goes out from Sonoma County.
Data capture includes access to multiple data sources. They’ve invested lots of time and money into developing bots that capture information from these sources’ feeds that allow them to collaborate in Slack to help determine what they are going to do. Slack’s owner, Salesforce, has also provided them with a lot of funding to help with the cost of obtaining and verifying information from the various sources. Some parts of California don’t have the software-based scanners we have in Sonoma County. So, Watch Duty built their own Echo Radios and stashed them throughout the state and in Oregon and Washington. These Echo Radios allow Watch Duty to snoop in on conversations and then broadcast them out to the public. It’s a game changer! Watch Duty has also expanded to help provide information about prescribed burns, which allows the public to distinguish between “good” and “bad” fires. Watch Duty’s long term vision is to create a platform for disaster preparedness, actionable preventative measures, and useful insights and news.
Josh reminds us to download the Watch Duty app and start getting notified! Many thanks to Josh for the informative and interesting discussion of the work done by Watch Duty to show us how Watch Duty is working hard to keep us informed about fires throughout the state and beyond. Great job!
Click HERE to see a limited time recording of Josh Leone's presentation.
