Watch Duty, the wildfire alert app, is introducing flood alerts to its popular disaster-awareness service. This is the second disaster type to be broadly included, after wildfires; it’s available as a free update. If you have the app, you can subscribe to alerts in specific counties, and if there is a flood, Watch Duty will send you a push notification with more information about where it is and where it is spreading.
The nonprofit started in 2021 with a focus on California’s wildfires. The app has since expanded to the entire US, where it uses a combination of paid employee “reporters” and many more volunteers who monitor emergency responder radio channels and translate that information about disaster zones to app users.
Watch Duty became a critical resource during the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles last year, providing real-time information about the fire’s movements that users came to rely on. In the year since, Watch Duty has capitalized on that increased recognition and brought in thousands of new users and partnerships, including one with Amazon's Ring cameras that lets people share their Ring videos in Watch Duty if a fire is nearby.
Monitoring flooding takes a different approach than tracking wildfires. Floods tend to be more straightforward to monitor, because they usually have more predictable warning signs from official agencies. Barring a dam burst or other unexpected event, flood paths are easier to track.
“The difference with floods is we do have more warning,” says John Mills, Watch Duty’s CEO. “So frankly, it's a little bit easier in some regards.”
Easier to track and report doesn’t mean floods are any less complicated than fires. Information about flooding comes from a variety of agencies in the US, like FEMA, the National Weather Service, the US Geological Survey, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The problem with that, Mills contends, is that it’s so much information from so many different sources that people have a hard time reconciling everything and getting a clear picture of what is an immediate concern in their vicinity. What he wants to do with Watch Duty is distill that information into a more straightforward outlook.
“You're told to do something, but it's too late,” Mills says. “It's too little, it doesn't work. With Watch Duty, you can start to piece together a bunch of information all on one screen to make an informed decision.”
Watch Duty won’t be able to communicate more granular details, like when every tree goes down across the flood zone. Mills says flooding on Watch Duty will be presented more simply, with a focus on where the floodplain is and what the water levels are at. Flood forecasts depend on buoys that detect water height. Watch Duty now lets users find the nearest buoy and set a push notification alert for when it hits a high enough level that flooding could become a threat.
Watch Duty has reported some floods before, but those were one-off events. Getting floods fully integrated into the service has taken some time. Mills says having more disasters in Watch Duty was always the plan, but ensuring the feature works has been a challenge—especially during busy fire seasons.
“We wanted to start working on it in January of 2025, but you know what happened then,” Mills says. “This was always something we were going to do.”
Since the LA fires, Mills says Watch Duty has established itself as a resource for people in disaster-prone areas. That has also led to more investments and partnerships with the nonprofit. Mills says Watch Duty doubled its staff and leadership headcount. In April, Watch Duty partnered with Google.org to help build AI-powered tools that automatically transcribe responder radio traffic during wildfires.
Mills wants Watch Duty to expand to cover all natural disasters. Floods is the first step in that expansion, but eventually he thinks the service will be able to support much more. He does clarify that Watch Duty will only focus on natural disasters, not anything related to crime that would require monitoring police radio signals.
“I don't care if it's lava, wind, fire coming after you, that's where we want to be,” Mills says.
Source: Wired
