As Fires Approached LA, Angelenos Turned to Watch Duty
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See how they're scoring on us? Shots left and right. I know. They know our next play before we even make it. We got to tighten up off the court, too. Businesses track and sell our personal information. They dunk on us all the time with that data. Wait, what do you mean? You have to exercise your privacy rights. If you don't opt out of the sale and sharing of your information, businesses will always have the upper hand. The ball is in your court. Get your digital privacy game plan at privacy.ca.gov.

Earlier this week, I called up journalist Alyssa Jung Perry, who lives in L.A. Right now, I'm at my house in Los Angeles, California, specifically Highland Park. Alyssa is a reporter and producer, and she's done some work with us here at Slate. These days, she's in sort of triage mode, helping friends and neighbors who've been affected by the fires.

She remembers exactly when they started because it was right around her birthday and her mom was in town. Around 7, 7, 730 on Tuesday, the lights went out. My power went out. We heard like a huge bang. My power went out and the winds were really gathering and we had flashlights. And my mom and I were like, OK, well, maybe the power will come back on in like 30 minutes because that's usually what happens. It didn't.

So they went to bed. But that didn't last long. I started getting smoke and I went outside and the sky was like eerie. And there was like kind of like this hazy glow to it. And I was like, oh, there's a big fire. And all over social media, Alyssa's friends and colleagues were talking about one app. The fire and location warning app, WatchDuty.

Everybody I know started downloading Watch Duty. So I downloaded that and I turned the alerts on because usually I have my phone on complete silent when I sleep and I turn the alerts on. And so it was just dinging every minute basically of like different fires. It was like Palisades, Eaton, and it was like saying evacuation, go, go, go, go, go.

Alyssa is safe. Her house is safe. But like a lot of Los Angeles, she has been relying on digital alerts, not from the county, not from news organizations, but from watch duty. The app has been downloaded two and a half million times in the past week, and it shows how when it comes to natural disasters, the information ecosystem has changed.

I am on all these like Facebook neighborhood groups for like, but you know, buy nothing, whatever. And also I'm just nosy. A lot of people have questions and everyone says, download watch duty, download watch duty. Like don't ask these questions here. You're wasting time. You're creating hysteria.

Today on the show, we are going to talk to one of the creators of WatchDuty and ask what it means that in an emergency, Angelenos are turning not to a public utility, but to an app. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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He lived through three wildfires and found that he couldn't reliably track them in real time. But he moved in and was like, this is what everyone deals with all the time? That's Mills' co-founder and CTO, David Merritt. You know, I'm on Twitter and Facebook. I'm seeing airplanes go overhead and I can't find any information. I guess I need to get a radio scanner. I can't believe people live like this.

Not that people live there, but like that that is the tooling that was available to people in wild and urban interfaces. So in 2021, Merritt and Mills built WatchDuty. The app is free and run by a nonprofit, and the only information it requires is your location.

Normally, I would enter my neighborhood in Brooklyn, but for demonstration purposes, I used my high school best friend's house in L.A. The app shows me a map, I've got my friend's house marked, and then all the different active fires in and around the city. When I spoke with Merritt, my friend's house was right on the edge of a red flag warning from the Eaton Fire, which means imminent danger of severe fire weather.

What we want you to see is where fires are relative to a map that you understand. And then after clicking into an icon for a fire, all really a narrative and storyline of what's occurred. We want to give everyone the information that they need to make their safe, informed decisions. In certain fires, evacuation zones will be the thing that matters the most.

In other cases, in more rural areas, it may be that they live with fire more often. And they're like, that fire is 20 miles from my house. But to me, you know, whatever. You can add different layers to watch duty, like showing air quality in different areas. But it also shows things like food and water distribution points, as well as animal shelters. And while I have been calling it an app throughout this story, you can actually do all of this on the Web, too.

We've been developing it really incrementally. It started out with just fires, just that base level of information, just the layers for MODIS and VERUS, which are the satellite heat detection layers that some people choose to turn on. Then we added red flag warnings because that was a precursor to fires. People were already looking for that information, and one of our goals is to consolidate that

the context that may be required to make good decisions into a single place that's easy to use. There are, of course, government evacuation alerts that people can sign up for on their phones or maps on the web from the National Interagency Fire Center. But what makes WatchDuty unique is the way it tracks fire information from all these different sources in real time and confirms it with real people.

They're surfing official websites, listening to scanners, seeking out and verifying real-time information, and putting it into the app.

and many of them are retired firefighters themselves. The reporters take it very, very seriously in terms of how they do the job. And I think that's generally been reflected in the accuracy and completeness of the reporting. Humans are slower than automated processes. And yet there's been this huge push, obviously, in Silicon Valley to automate everything, to use machine learning, to make it faster. Yeah. You're not doing that. Tell me why.

We enable the experts to be faster than they would be without automation, but the automation doesn't supplant the need for human verification. Last year, we realized that reporters were having to refresh Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to get these updates from official government sources because unfortunately, they're only posting on Facebook now in some cases.

And they were spending hours a day doing this stuff. So we automated that. It's like, remove the tedious work and let people focus on the stuff that they're really good at. And I just think...

There's all these discussions around LLM hallucinations and quality and all this stuff. If it's life and safety, I'd much rather have people. It doesn't scale as well. It's the reason why we're not across the entire US yet. We don't feel like we have the size or experience to double the states in one year. But we'd rather be a little more slow and measured and have a little bit of this less magical scalability that everybody wants.

Because we realize that it's too important to think that we can just automate everything. When we come back, just a few years ago, people tracked wildfires on Twitter. Watch Duties Rise is also a story about our degraded information ecosystem.

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Hello, Slate listeners. This is Felix Salmon from Slate Money. I'm sure you've been seeing the headlines from Los Angeles. The wildfires there, the insurance situation there, the prisoners working on the ground as firefighters. So...

What's really happening and what are the implications of all of this? We just had an episode of Slate Money. It's called The Dire Costs of the LA Fires. My co-hosts Emily Peck and Elizabeth Spires and I talk through questions like why people are so fixated on the celebrity homes that have been destroyed.

I think people are focusing on celebrities right now, partly because the bigger macro problems are really overwhelming and terrifying. Where California needs to go from here. And how we should be thinking about the use of inmates as firefighters and whether this choice given to inmates is really a choice at all. It's an offer you can't refuse. Listen to the dire costs of the L.A. fires on Slate Money today.

I asked David Merritt why he thinks WatchDuty has become a go-to source in this disaster. It's being shared by family members. It's being shared by community members. It's being shared by media. But I think, you know, really the explosion, and this has been true everywhere,

where our user base is grown, is because people see that they're given the information, that they're trusted to make the right decisions, that they're given information early and accurately. And I think that they can contextualize it. Some of the approaches that traditional government approaches to notifying you about evacuations, they're really late in the process. If there's a fire 10 miles from my house, I would like to know when it starts.

Not when it's five miles from my house and I need to be evacuated. You know, there's a pre-planning process that people need. They need to, or you're going to be a little more panicked. You know, you need to figure out where your dog is. You need to get your stuff in order. You need to think through, do I need to leave? Should I go fill up the gas tank? You know, like there's a thousand things that you can figure out if you're given more information earlier.

And I think that's one of the principles we try to go with is if we give people the right information, they'll make the best decisions. I messaged with a friend of a friend in L.A. who said that the city alert was basically just like a thing on their phone that said leave now. But because he had watched it, he was able to actually watch the fire approach his home.

And the other thing with text-based messages is, you know, you don't gain any of that geospatial context. You don't understand all the other things. You know, here in San Francisco, we got a tsunami alert a month ago or so. You know, I clicked on it and there's nowhere else to look. You know, what she doesn't have an answer for that yet. But, you know, that contextualization of a very important message is

everybody says, oh, what else can I look at? How can I find out more information? How do I understand how this is relevant to me? The traditional ways for that information to get out kind of lack that additional context. I mean, isn't there something damning in the sentence that you just uttered that the traditional ways of getting that information out lack the context? Like,

all things being equal, wouldn't it be nice for Watch Judy not to have to exist? I think, you know, we filled a gap that wasn't being provided. You know, I think there's a lot of very valid reasons why it's much harder for public organizations and public governments to do what we're doing. And I think the other piece that's really nice is that for us, you know, we don't have to worry about coordination between states.

and counties, you know, we're just a service that across that's consistent across all of them. So, you know, if you live between California and Oregon, you don't need to understand that there's two places to go. You know, I agree that, you know, we view ourselves as a public service. Um, and traditionally those are provided by the government, you know, but at the same time, it isn't being provided in a way that's satisfactory. And, um,

The firefighting agencies do a fantastic job of fighting fires. We have absolutely no criticisms. And it's challenging for them to have a full-time staff in little organizations. They might have one or two people that are supposed to send out information, but they don't have the tools that we've built

You know, they don't have 25 people on the staff for when someone when it's late at night, when it's early in the morning, when someone's on vacation. You know, that's the other piece to this is that, you know, by doing it at a larger geographic scale, we're able to not have some of the challenges that local organizations and local firefighting agencies might have the same issue with trying to get information out.

You know, you talked about trust, and I'm just spinning my mind back. I mean, if this had been five years ago, ten years ago, Twitter, now X, would have been a reliable, verified source of information if you had, you know, L.A. County's Twitter. Do you think the degradation of the information environment has made it more necessary to have something like Watch Judy? Could it have existed in the same way?

when it was easier to get the news on Twitter, on Facebook, on other platforms. Yeah. I mean, we talk about that internally quite a bit because it's, you know, we're all consumers of these platforms as well. And it's frustrating to see that everything is behind a login now. And especially frustrating to see that government officials are using these sources more

There are publishing official updates on sites that require logins. I think that there still would have been a very important need for a specific platform because even if you take away all the challenges with how Facebook presents itself, you don't want a push notification and notification about a fire to be next to the notification that your friend's dog had a birthday.

You know, like you just, it needs a different sound. It needs a different, you know, you need to be able to take that signal out of the noise. And I think that's really, you know, even with the kind of privacy and publishing challenges that Twitter X and Facebook have right now, I think there's still that, like, it's okay to have a dedicated thing. And, you know, everybody wants to be a platform or a,

or the thing for everything. An everything app. An everything app. And in this case, it's like, no, it's okay to just have a wildfire app and, you know, a natural disaster thing that, you know, you can really trust. Because it's just going to be better than a generic platform. WatchDuty users can join a paid membership tier, but as a nonprofit, the app mostly relies on grants and donations, including a $2 million grant from Google. You know, there's no...

There's no shareholders. There's no, no one has any stock. It's a nonprofit, you know, really it's,

It's for the public. Would you ever sell it? No, no, definitely not. So Microsoft comes and says, oh, you're a nonprofit. You can make part of it a for-profit arm and we'll give you a $10 million investment. Like that scenario, the open AI scenario is not for you. Yeah, I think my friend, the CEO, John, actually recently just said, we'll never pull an open AI. Yes. You know, I don't, I thought I just laughed at that. But yeah, no, I don't, you know,

There have been some examples recently where I've seen nonprofits and small things kind of really shift gears and be sold, but we're not in a position where that's going to happen. You know, the,

Every, you know, as much as it is a technology platform, it's also the reporters. It's such a unique partnership. And God, we'd have a revolt on our hands on the reporter side if that ever happened, because people are really dedicated to it. But no, we're not going to sell it. We're not collecting any data. So, you know, we have a user base, but we don't have anything to sell besides the, you know, the goodwill and the utility that we're providing. You know,

It is not lost on me that some of what you were talking about used to be provided by local media sources. And it just makes me wonder if you have thought about the splintering of the information environment and why you are in the position that you are in, creating another platform as opposed to

you know, trying to rectify, I guess, larger information sources or places people used to get reliable information. Like, what does it say to you that you've had to build something out of whole cloth to solve this problem? You know, in this case, I'm not sure that it's so much that we needed to fix the existing information. It's just that this information never got out to anyone in a good way.

especially around fires where really minutes can make the difference between life and death. You know, the traditional approaches just weren't good enough. You know, I want to know right away that there's a fire five miles from my house. You know, there really isn't time for traditional media even or the traditional approaches. So

We had to build it ourselves, but it wasn't actually that complicated to build. It was more that we had a very focused understanding of the problem and weren't trying to do everything at once. Again, it's like we understood it would be a partnership between tech and reporters. I think that was a unique approach that we took that no one else has done. But again, it's that

David Merritt, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. Nice to chat with you. David Merritt is the CTO of WatchDuty and Alyssa Jung Perry is a journalist in Los Angeles.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shana Roth. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. And this is Alicia's last week here. And I wanted to take a special moment to thank her for her leadership, her wisdom, and her friendship. Alicia, we are going to miss you very much.

TBD is also part of the larger What Next family, and if you like what you heard, the best way to support us is by joining Slate Plus. Starting this week, we are launching some all-new bonus episodes for TBD. Extra content you can only get by subscribing to Plus. Twice a month, we'll sit down with some of Slate's best tech reporters and dissect the online discourse that is burning up our feeds.

But here is the thing. These episodes will only be available to Slate Plus members. We'll give regular listeners a little free sample, but to hear the whole thing, you gotta subscribe. If you are not already a subscriber, try it out for free by heading over to the TBD page on Apple Podcasts and clicking Try Free. The Discourse launches this Friday after your regular dose of TBD. We'll see you there. I am Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

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