‘All hands on deck’: How Watch Duty is keeping up with California wildfires

Like, download Watch Duty and get results there. Otherwise, get busy, man. Check it out on the internet and hope it makes you feel better. I feel bad for them, honestly, you know? I’ve been through this before. But the way I coped is by building Watch Duty, not by shouting into the airwaves. We all have our own coping mechanisms. Some are productive and some are not.

Screenshot: Courtesy of Watch Duty

Do you think that giving people more information about what’s happening on the ground will help them be smarter about what they say online? Or will all this nonsense still happen?

I don’t know, man. I wish I had a good answer so I could engage with your question, but I just don’t care about these people. It’s just so uninteresting. People are still running from the fire right now. And that’s what really matters. I don’t need any more sketchy reporters. There are great reporters who aren’t on Watch Duty, like a group of people who are out there relaying information to the population of X, which is great. I’m glad they do. I wish they had a better platform for this. There are still great people on social media, but unfortunately you have to wade through bitcoin porn and other random stuff that is being replaced by Chinese bots right now.

So what’s next? How does Watch Duty specifically approach the next few days of this fire and then the fires beyond?

This is a great moment for a Mike Tyson quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Right now, we’re getting punched in the face repeatedly. When I’m in this mode, we don’t make strategic plans.

We are extremely tactical. We focus on what’s in front of us, just like a firefighter does. That’s what we’re doing today, keeping our servers online, keeping the engineers powered, making sure they can keep this thing running as we experience three orders of magnitude of explosive growth. And then reporters also need sleep, they need pep talks, they need help. So, it’s really just “get through it,” man. Tonight we will experience another wind event. We are far from done and tonight is going to be another hell of a bad one.

And in the long term? What is the future of how people use Watch Duty?

I can talk about long-term things because I’ve been thinking about it for ages. We really think a lot about what it looks like to have other disasters in Watch Duty. We are currently actively developing it. We’re working on making sure we can do the same thing we did in LA for the next one Hurricane Helen. Because these floods were catastrophic. People didn’t have enough warning, they didn’t understand it. And there is good data out there that is not being made available to the masses. We want to be a voice of reason during these truly difficult times. And that’s what’s next for us when we get through this crap.

Beats sitting there in despair.

yes I have to be constructive, you understand?