How did Watch Duty become the most downloaded iOS app during recent wildfires? Nick Russell, VP, Operations at Watch Duty, came on the Grid Forward Forum podcast to detail the history of the app and how it helps local responders and utilities before, during and after a wildfire event. Read the except below (lightly edited for clarity) for an inside look at how Watch Duty got started and how it keeps utilities and other stakeholders in the know.
Listen to the entire podcast here or on Apple, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and most other popular podcast platforms.
You can see Nick in person at the upcoming symposium Standing Up to Wildfire: Practical Tips and Tactics for Utilities. Get more information on this focused on-day event happening on June 4, 2025 in Portland, OR.
Bryce Yonker: So wildfires have come to impact most states in the western US and many places beyond that in the last handful of years. Can you briefly give us a bit of the history with Watch Duty, and what you all are looking to accomplish now?
Nick Russell: Yeah, absolutely. So Watch Duty began back in August of 2021, when our co-founder and CEO, John Clark Mills, moved to a rural area in northern Sonoma County, where we're both located, so completely off the grid where he was. [He] definitely had cell service, but after the first few months of moving in, he started noticing aircraft flying over with buckets, dropping water on smoky areas. And it was a new thing for him. He was trying to look around and was finding very little information about what was happening. And as time went on, he started discovering local groups who were getting this information in a crowdsourced fashion through those groups to the community.
Fast forward to August of 2020. He was forced out of his newly acquired ranch due to the Walbridge fire, which was up here in Sonoma County. When he got to a safe area, he starts looking, where's the fire at? Where did it start? Where did they see the danger going? What are the impacts to critical infrastructure? Where do I go for resources? He found the information, but it was as a result of going to many different locations and trying to aggregate a story together based off of what was being said.
But when he turned back to those local groups, they had every piece that he was looking for… staying up all night long trying to track the fire where it was. So as the dust settled, he thought, "Wow, there's got to be a better way to get this information all in one place." And so he set out to learn more about wildland response and suppression.
In August of 2021, the app was born and served the original three counties Sonoma, Lake, and Napa County. We quickly realized that it wasn't just community members that were in John's position. It was mutual aid resources coming from out of the area, utilities coming from out of the area to assist, you know, other utilities and large outages or emergent situations. And they all had fragmented information because there wasn't a centralized place to get it. So John said, "Wow, we got to figure out how we can help more people." And so Watch Duty eventually expanded into the entire state of California, and then 11 additional states the following year. Now we're in 22 states and 1,476 counties. And the mission really is to aggregate all the information on disasters as a whole, starting with wildfire, to get people to actionable information, they need to make decisions.
Bryce Yonker: So preparing for wildfires is something that falls on really everyone that's in these high risk areas. You mentioned first responders and emergency management. You already mentioned utilities. But really it goes all the way down to businesses and individuals themselves. How do you see the overall collaboration happening? What does that look like so that you can be ready for these massive events like a major wildfire?
Nick Russell: The challenging situation right now is what we see with each new emergent large wildfire are things that we've never seen before, right? Whether it's tremendous wind-driven growth or consuming large, populous areas. So I think seeing is believing, and a lot of people are seeing what's happening in the devastation in these areas, which motivates them to take action at a granular level.
Because you're right, it's all stakeholders. I just mentioned a few of those stakeholders, but it could be local businesses. It could be agricultural operations like I was a part of. You know, these are all people who need that actionable information. And so getting that all into one place is crucial. And getting the message of what could happen and preparing accordingly is how the difference is made.
I don't think we're going to stop wildfire ignitions overnight or even in the next five years. But what we can do is work together as communities, as stakeholders in varying capacities and increase defensible space.
It’s not always about these huge, tremendous financial undertakings. Sometimes it's the small elbow grease efforts at a neighbor by neighbor in a neighborhood that makes the difference. You know, getting that defensible space behind the home, defensible space and utility right of ways and the list goes on and on. And businesses in fire prone areas, especially as the high risk areas, seem to increase in density year over year throughout many Western states. That continues that eastward trend as well.
So complacency is really the place you don't want to be, and awareness is where you want to be.
Bryce Yonker: Emergency management, fire agencies, a lot of folks need to do something with an alert on a pending wildfire threat. How does the role of the electric grid operator, the utilities come into this overall ecosystem as you are figuring out the community response to a pending wildfire?
Nick Russell: It's very much bidirectional between grid operators at distribution transmission levels and Watch Duty situational awareness tools that we've built, because there's the precursor to a potential event, whether that's PSPS, red flag conditions, fire weather warnings... So we're watching that.
We want to understand where are potential areas for PSPS. We very much appreciate them because we see the results of damaged equipment in a PSPS area, and no new ignitions took place. But when the power is de-energized, we want to make sure that we're hyper aware because there are instances where folks don't take opportunities to charge devices or that can become more challenging. So we want to be cognizant of that internally.
But then as far as the situational awareness platform, I spend time visiting control centers and utilities in varying capacities and hazard awareness centers. And you see Watch Duty there because we're telling that contextual story from the start of ignition until the threat passes until the last engine leaves. And we're doing it in a unique way by telling a storyline of events, much like sports reporting.
Operators can see the contextual reports that are on many large displays in these centers and make decisions to de-energize before they receive those calls from first responders asking for that to happen.
Bryce Yonker: Are the operators getting a different interface than customers are? Or is everybody seeing the same information at the same time as they interact with the app?
Nick Russell: The information that everybody is getting is the same. It's where they look at it at, right? Because you know, anybody can go to app.watchduty.org online and see the same thing they see on their phone, or they can download it on whatever their mobile platform is.
But there are a lot of proprietary tools being used at utilities that interface a lot of functions that we don't have in Watch Duty, right. So we do display that inside proprietary tools. We've understood over time is that works really well in control centers.
But when you start to get out in the field, that becomes a bit more challenging. So one of the big things that we're excited about launching here shortly is Watch Duty Teams, which will allow utilities to import those GIS layers and those other assets into the Watch Duty map and have a what I like to refer to as a common operating platform for situational awareness.
Listen to the entire podcast here or on most popular podcast platforms. See Nick in person at the upcoming symposium Standing Up to Wildfire: Practical Tips and Tactics for Utilities, June 4, 2025 in Portland, OR.