Becoming the go-to app for natural disaster tracking

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John Mills: After you live through a couple disasters, you start to see the beauty in humanity. We band together. You see ranchers leaving their bulldozer with their keys there, saying, “Take it.” People are spray-painting signs, telling first responders that there’s a pool in the backyard and a pump and equipment. And you watch the beauty in people and in the world when these things happen. So I don’t focus on the bad, I see the good in humans.

Bob Safian: That’s John Mills, CEO of Watch Duty, a digital platform providing real-time information about wildfires. Watch Duty surged in use during the LA fires earlier this year, even overtaking ChatGPT in downloads. As deadly floods in Central Texas have demonstrated the lapses in today’s public disaster warning systems, I wanted to talk to John about how his small nonprofit responded in the heat of LA’s crisis to outpace well-funded government agencies. John shares how the platform is expanding to become a warning system around the country, although not soon enough to help those in Texas. The Watch Duty story underscores both our growing vulnerability to natural disasters and the power of community-based solutions to keep us safe and connected when it matters most.I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty. John, thanks for being here.

MILLS: Thanks for having me, Bob. I’m excited to talk to you guys today.

SAFIAN: So I first learned about Watch Duty during the LA fires in January. A couple of our producers were evacuating, checking the app constantly. For listeners who don’t know, can you explain, what is Watch Duty?

Copy LinkThe gap in public disaster alerting

MILLS: Absolutely. I mean, really simply put, Watch Duty is an emergency alerting system for wildfires. My background is in tech, and my background physically here is the woods. So I live off the grid here in Sonoma County. I’m speaking to you on a Starlink connection. I make my own power, my own water, and my own infrastructure. I have no connection to the outside world, other than how I’m talking to you now.

And after living here for a little while, you start to have a couple harrowing close calls. I’ve had two fires within a quarter mile of my property. You really realize you’re on your own out here, which I knew, obviously. They don’t say “off the grid” for nothing.

But I would’ve assumed that there was infrastructure for this. And the first time it happened to me, there were helicopters over my house. There was a tanker dropping retardant on my neighbor’s house. My phone wasn’t going off. There was nothing on the news.

It’s almost like it wasn’t happening to me, and I was dumbfounded. And after a while, I really started to realize that I had to do something about it.

SAFIAN: So you decided there was a need for this. Now, as I understand it, Watch Duty, it’s a nonprofit and it’s an app that gathers information largely from volunteers, right? From regular people who are monitoring fires? It’s like a community?

MILLS: Very much so. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is, we do it live.

And so we have about 200 volunteers, about 20 paid staff, about 10 of those are radio operators themselves. But the information really comes from fire service radio.

So after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that there’s not a Starlink in every truck. The communication systems aren’t very good. The firefighters are in danger, and the only way to hear what’s actually going on is through them actually collaborating with each other in real time, through the radio itself.

And so we hear: “Fire starting here, burning over this ridge, tankers and dozers are coming, holding the line to Highway 87. Now the wind’s picking up, the fire’s spotting over the ridge, it’s burning over so-and-so, houses are being impacted.”

You hear this live. There is no data source for this. There’s not a place for this to happen without us. And so that’s how we do what we do.

Copy LinkBuilding a community-driven response system

SAFIAN: And this community of volunteers, are they fire workers? Or are some of them just watching and sharing what they’re seeing?

MILLS: A lot of them were 30, 40-year wildland firefighters, dispatchers, reporter types, sons and daughters of firefighters who grew up in the fire service, with the radio chatting in the background.

SAFIAN: So it sounds like there was a community that was there that you tapped into. I understand you had to persuade them a little bit to see you as more than just a tech guy.

MILLS: Yeah, I mean, that’s the beauty of this. We just saw the human behavior and helped enable them to do it better. And so one of the fires I went through, which was one of the big ones in 2020, when the sky turned red up in Northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and Twitter already doing this. And so they were kind of regionalized. There was someone in Red Bluff, someone in Redding, someone in SoCal, someone in Sonoma, Napa.

And so they were independently doing this. They knew each other. They would talk and collaborate a little bit, but they wouldn’t organize together. They weren’t adversarial, they just didn’t spend time really collaborating. So they would independently be doing this.

And the innovation was really, convince them all to work together. That I was not a techie, that I lived here, like them, in the same danger that they did.

And that was really, the key was to convince them that, “I’m here to help. I’m part of this community. I’m not sitting in my laboratory in Silicon Valley trying to profiteer off of your disaster.”

SAFIAN: And the information that they’re sharing, the app puts it into a more usable form or a more accessible form?

MILLS: Yeah, it’s a great question. We didn’t change their behavior, so they were always listening to radios, and speaking the language of the fire service, and putting it on Facebook and Twitter. And so what happens behind the scenes is actually a lot more data. There’s a lot of signals coming in, and a lot of it is very tactical and minor, and we don’t want that to go out on Watch Duty. And so they’re collaborating in Slack. So they’re all talking and listening.

So it’s very rare where there’s one person running an incident. There’s many people in real time content editing: “15 acres heading north-northwest. Was it 50 or 15?” “Oh shoot, let’s wait for the next transmission, air attack’s about to be overhead.” “We’re going to get a size-up on the fire.”

Then we deploy the information on Watch Duty. So in real time, they’re collaborating. Someone has the con, or control, and that person’s essentially incident commander.

SAFIAN: So some of the folks who are on duty or running the event at that time, some of them may be volunteers and some of them may be some of your staff people?

MILLS: Yep. Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. Like many nonprofits, there’s paid staff and then there’s volunteers.

And a lot of our volunteers are now either changing careers or having a second career, because first, they contribute and they listen, and then they start to report, and then they become a staff reporter or a regional captain in the area and help run and collaborate certain parts of a state or a region. And then many of them actually become full-time employees.

SAFIAN: Take us back to January 7th of this year, the day the fires broke out in Los Angeles. What do you remember about the very beginning? Where were you? What were you thinking?

Copy LinkHandling sudden surges and unexpected demand

MILLS: I was on a call with one of our larger donors. I think it was Google. Google.org gave us $2,000,000 last year, which was extraordinarily helpful and we frankly needed it, especially given what happened in January.

I was on a call and we got the first sign of ignition at 10:31 AM. By 10:33, we had our first alert out. I saw it on my phone. The meeting kept going and I had to click on it and see, and I saw an incredible amount of smoke and fire in a region that is extraordinarily dangerous. This was the Palisades, by the way. That was the first one that lit off.

And so I told them on the call, I was like, “I think this is going to be a cataclysmic event that we’re witnessing.” I think we got off the call a little bit early that day and then it was all hands on deck for at least a week. I don’t think I slept straight for a month.

Very quickly, we turn the radio traffic on because I am a geek at heart and want to hear what’s going on. And frankly, you can see on the fire cameras just how bad this fire actually is.

Very quickly, we started to clock incredible amounts of downloads. I think the first day was like 600,000 downloads, another 1,000,000 the next day. I think by the time it was done, it was like two and a half million downloads.

In a peak, we’re doing about 100,000 requests a second with a team of four engineers at the time. So it was the most traffic I’ve ever seen in my career.

SAFIAN: I saw that Watch Duty passed ChatGPT as the number one downloaded app. The traffic must have really caught you by surprise, just like the fire did.

MILLS: Yeah, it did. Here’s the sad part. We’ve been the number one app in the app store three times. This time was the worst, by far.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I mean, LA’s own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was buggy. It was sending false alerts. So it wasn’t just LA residents that were using Watch Duty, right? It was government officials and firefighters and the helicopter pilots. Everybody seemed to be on it.

MILLS: Yes, the government also uses Watch Duty. We’re on all the big screens and all the emergency operation centers.

We’ve done something that others haven’t been able to crack, and it’s a usable format. So whether you’re a little old lady or a hose dragger or a brush bunny, as firefighters refer to themselves as in the wildlands, they all use it and it’s done something that we didn’t see coming.

We assumed that the government had all that information and they just weren’t telling us, not out of malice, but they’re busy, they’re trying to fight the fire.

It’s very granular, the information we share, and then quickly we realize that we’re getting emails from tanker pilots and dozer operators and others telling us that we give them more information than overhead gives them.

And that’s when we really realized this is a much bigger company than we ever thought possible.

Copy LinkExposing weaknesses in existing emergency systems

SAFIAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s strange. Is Watch Duty’s success, I don’t know, an example of the government’s failure or the failure of tax-funded technology? Or was there just no investment in this?

MILLS: Yeah, look, I mean, we work so closely with a lot of these government organizations and there’s failure abound. It’s everywhere. It’s how we voted as individuals. It’s the other software vendors who were selling lackluster products. It’s the government having no other options.

There’s so many points of failure here. It just really just compounded that day and it was very apparent how necessary we were.

It’s hard to just point blame at one person or one org. I know that’s what everybody wants is they want to blame the boogeyman so we can go fix it.

And it’s not just climate change, it’s bad forest management. It’s like there’s so many things that are all working against us here. It’s making this problem extraordinarily bad.

SAFIAN: I mean, as you’re talking about this, the trajectory of Watch Duty dramatically accelerated with those fires, as you said, millions of users today, quadruple growth year over year. You’re now available, if I have this right, in 22 states, expanding to the East coast. What does the roadmap ahead look like for Watch Duty? How are you maybe thinking about things differently than you were a few months ago?

MILLS: The best thing about this company is when you’re a man on a mission like me or a company on a mission, it only just exacerbates and strengthens what we’ve done.

So like any good organization, you don’t just pivot all of a sudden because you’re on The Tonight Show. It really just helps you with more funding and more strength and more allies to help us go farther.

And so, as you mentioned, we’re going to be pushing to the East Coast. We need to get all the way from Maine to Florida. We’re not in Alaska yet. We are in Hawaii. So that’s paramount because fires are everywhere.

And then, if you think more deeply, I remind people, Watch Duty is not called Fire Duty. There’s a reason fire isn’t in the name.

It’s really about natural disaster and geospatial problems that are going to affect your day or your life and change the course of your reality.

And so whether it’s a flood around the corner that you can’t see or a fire coming, the response is the same.

Copy LinkExpanding beyond wildfires to new disaster challenges

So you think about a human-centered problem, “What do I need to do to survive what I can’t see?”

And so that’s where we really come into play and that’s where our sweet spot is.

SAFIAN: Watch Duty was a much needed resource for LA residents and safety workers. So how might it translate to other kinds of natural disasters? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we heard Watch Duty’s John Mills talk about how the service rose to prominence when wildfires hit LA. Now we dig into the future of disaster response across the country and how an organization that’s most relevant in the worst moments of people’s lives can have an impact even during more peaceful seasons. Let’s get back to it.

As you move beyond tracking just wildfires, I mean, I can imagine that the process might have to adjust in some ways for hurricanes or tornadoes or floods, what have you. Is that just about expanding the pool of volunteers? How do you prepare the platform to cover these other kinds of natural disasters?

MILLS: We’ve tried to listen to radios during certain incidents. Last winter, we had 12 inches of rain, I think, in like 24 hours here in Northern California. And you listen to the radios and it is complete chaos, just trees down and roads clogged constantly.

So the radio is constantly going, “Tree down here, tree down here, tree down there, this road closed, this thing’s flooded, swift water rescue.” Constant. My team will probably go insane trying to listen to that much radio chatter.

That said, fire is the most challenging because there’s the least amount of digital information about it. If you look at floods, for example, you can do a lot with earth observation. You can see a lot from space. You can see a lot from river gauges. You can see a lot from other digital sources.

We think it’s going to be easier but challenging in other ways. And so we’re still learning through that process.

Copy LinkBalancing technology, AI and the human element

SAFIAN: I mean, when you talk about all of the information that’s coming in, the high volume of it, might AI help to scale what you’re doing? Or is it too risky to rely on AI in these life and death situations?

MILLS: Yeah, I mean, we don’t rely on AI, but we definitely use it and we use it more and more and more. It really helps us do signal intelligence processing. So how do we make our staff more efficient at what they do so they can hear farther distances and do more things at once?

And so it’s already in a couple places in our product internally, and we’re going to continue to do that to make them more efficient. But full on replacement is just A, it’s dangerous, to your point.

It’s a very Silicon Valley construct. People really believe that AI is the future of everything, just like people thought blockchain before that, they thought Web 2 before that, they thought Web 1 before that.

It’s just this constant thing of people trying to build the future, but skipping reality of what we’re currently in and what we’re really good at is dealing with the here and now and using the tools we have at our disposal to deal with clear and present danger today.

SAFIAN: Your reliance on volunteers, I mean, there is risk in that too. A lot of these people are amateurs or hobbyists trying to help, right? Is there anything you do to protect yourselves or protect others or train those volunteers?

MILLS: I mean, we have tons of training. We don’t just say, “Oh, you fought wildland fires? Start posting on Watch Duty.” We have an internal LMS, we have training programs, we have mentoring programs. And so that has to happen.

We are constantly, constantly getting better, learning, and they teach each other.

And then second of all, you got to remember, these folks were doing this for years before we met them. And their passion and their hobby has become their job. I mean, one of them just got a tattoo of our logo on her arm recently. I mean, this is their lifestyle. This has changed their reality. They are dedicated human beings.

And then the final thought is 70% of California firefighters are volunteers. The world doesn’t actually know how the world works sometimes. It’s kind of wild.

And so volunteerism is alive and well in humanity, and we’re very blessed to be a shining example of just how powerful volunteerism is.

SAFIAN: As I’m listening to you here, you’re in a strange position where in a certain way, bad things need to happen in the world for the app to feel necessary and succeed. I wonder if that’s something you think about?

MILLS: Every day. Every day. And so there’s a couple of things that we’re doing here. One of them is we have a professional version that’s $99 a year, and first responders are buying it in droves. Telcos, utilities, PG&E is one of our largest customers. And so we are building a professional product that is used year round.

And so we’re trying to get the “lumpiness” out of the business, out of our revenue stream because I know I talk about our company like it is a company, it is a nonprofit, but it doesn’t mean we are devoid of making money to support ourselves. And so we have a lot of ways that we think about how we survive, no matter what.

God forbid we have a quiet fire season. You know what? I live in the woods, so that’s good news for me. So we don’t want to profiteer off of disaster. This is our home and we live here.

But there’s other types of disasters out there that people may not think about. So let’s use air quality, for example. Air quality is still a problem and it does become a disaster for people.

So the way we look at it, the same way I look at floods or unseen issues, you don’t know that tomorrow is going to be a 150 PM 2.5 day, and for some reason, these weather apps and other apps do not seem to be very good about telling you that.

And so one of the features we’re launching this summer is you’ll be able to set alerts for air quality. And so the app will ping you when the air quality is bad.

So Watch Duty is the app that you want to have but never hear from. So you download it, you set some things up, you put it in your pocket, and you hope you never hear from us.

But we are extraordinarily relevant in other situations as well that are not your typical disaster, but do provide value to you.

And so we’re thinking about this well beyond just, we’re here for doomsday. We’re also here for the days that are destructive and will change your behavior, and that’s where we want to sit as a company.

SAFIAN: You mentioned that Watch Duty is a nonprofit. Last year, before the LA fires, something like 80% of your budget I understand was from $25 donations. You also mentioned a big donation, though, from Google.org. When it comes to your business model, has that changed since the fire, since all this attention?

MILLS: I mean, we’ve had a lot of money come in. In the LA fires alone, I think we raised almost $3,000,000, three and a half million, in the first 60 days since that fire broke out. And so that money helps us survive.

We’ve definitely hired some more staff, but our hiring plans didn’t change that much. We definitely had a little more to play with, but we still have about a year and a half or more worth of runway in the bank.

And we need to be able to weather the storm. We need to be able to prove our business to government relationships that those sales work. And so we can’t just blow all that money on, I don’t know what, what we would blow it on, but I’ve run companies before and I’ve also watched companies get huge injections of cash and then double their staff, lose their culture, and destroy their business.

And so we’re very patient and diligent about what we do, just like a firefighter would be. You don’t change plans in the middle of a firefight.

SAFIAN: You’ve described you and your team as “mercenaries in missionary’s clothing.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

MILLS: I can’t wait for the Silicon Valley techies to build some AI and bring the drones and launch the satellites. I live in the woods and every fire season, a fire is coming. We have to do something about it.

And so although we are a nonprofit organization, we need to win and push like it’s a for-profit corporation. I like to remind people that just because we’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean we need to behave like a charity. We behave like a not-for-profit. And so the motivations are the same. We chase value, we’re value creators.

And so the mercenary part comes from just being Silicon Valley operators. We have to win. We have, I wouldn’t say competitors because no one does what we do, but there are people in the space who are building products for money that are being sold to governments that are too expensive and they’re not very good.

And so we have to fight and push to push them out and make sure that we survive and make sure that the first responders and the citizens get what they need.

Copy LinkMotivation, impact and entrepreneurial drive

SAFIAN: As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, you helped found a restaurant management app, sold it for a good bit of money. Why not take it easy after that? Or was that what you were planning to do and then this just presented itself to you?

MILLS: I guess I could have just done nothing and retired. I mean, what would I do with my life? I mean, this is the most exciting job in the world. I get to fight the man and change the system. I mean, what’s more interesting than that?

To start a nonprofit, to provide a place and an avenue for techies like myself to use their skills to better the world. This is what I wanted to see in the world. This is a shining example of exactly the type of work that I want to be supporting in the future.

And frankly, I’m in my early 40s, I’m not ready to retire. I still have another fight left in me. And so doing this will not only help me survive here in my community, it will also help put us on the map as a nonprofit organization who’s really thinking differently about the world and trying to make a difference.

And I think that it’ll allow us to do something bigger when I’m in my 50s in the next, whatever, seven years from now when I’m a little grayer balder, I’ll be able to really fund and support other crazy ideas because of the work we’ve done here today.

So it felt like the right thing to do and an incredible opportunity to really do something incredible that the world’s never seen before.

SAFIAN: Well, and you’ve said that this work shows you the best in humanity. Does it make you more optimistic about the future?

MILLS: I’ve never been a doomsday person anyway, so I try and control what I can in this reality. I can’t control everything, but locally, you can control a lot.

If I’m unable to change my local world, my community, my environment, I won’t be able to change the world. And so I think it’s a great place to start is, just thinking about how we make a difference at home. Like fix your roads, your schools, your community, and do the best that you can.

And if you get lucky enough and you catch the fire truck, maybe get to do something bigger. But if you don’t start somewhere and start small, you’re never going to get to somewhere big.

And that’s why I think there’s the problem with really big problems like political climates or climate change or things like that. They feel insurmountable.

And this allows me to believe that I’m making a difference and helping my local community, and now I’m helping more communities and maybe we’ll help the world.

Copy LinkSupporting first responders and changing collective action

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Watch Duty right now?

MILLS: I think what’s really important when we think about what Watch Duty represents is we’re here to help the first responders as well as the government and individuals.

And it’s important to realize that ignoring all the infighting that’s going on in LA and all this blame that’s being passed around is like these folks are trying their damnedest. They don’t have enough resources, not enough people are building things to help them. Some are just flat out obstructionists and trying to profiteer off of this, and there are really wonderful people fighting with a hand tied behind their back.

This blame game is not helpful. We need to help fund better resource allocation for forest management, for firefighters, for the recovery of firefighters. These people are inhaling horrible chemicals and meanwhile we’re blaming the water system, but ask any water engineer, those pipes are not big enough to deliver that type of water. There’s physical problems that people aren’t understanding.

And without a systems mentality, you’re just sitting there and pointing fingers rather than trying to figure out how we’re going to work together to solve these challenges.

So I just implore everybody to try and research and learn and be patient and try their best to come to grips with this reality that we’re living in and that we all can play a part and we can all be heroes.

SAFIAN: John, this was great. Thank you so much for doing it.

MILLS: Thank you. It was a blast. I love telling the story and this is what I do every day.

SAFIAN: “We can all be heroes.” It’s an inspiring thought at a time when heroes are in short supply, at least on the biggest public stages.

I’m struck by John’s emphasis on local impact. He wants to change the world. He says so several times. But the way to get there, he stresses, is by making a tangible impact now where we are and building from there.

In that way, Watch Duty shows the impact we can have when we stay grounded amid chaos.

So what anchors you when the world feels unpredictable? Where do you find purpose that’s resilient? Those are the places worth building from. To those impacted by the Texas floods, our thoughts and our prayers are with you. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.