As 2022 comes to a close we find ourselves reminiscing about the successes of the year as well as our big plans for the new year.  We began this year with only 7 reporters covering 4 California counties (Sonoma, Lake, Napa, and Mendocino) and finished the year covering all 58 counties in California with only 19 reporters!  

Since covering all of California on June 1st, we have monitored nearly 1,600 incidents and sent out over 9,500 updates which resulted in 50 Million notifications being sent out to the community.  Many of those reports resulted in early evacuations and saving lives as we were the first to notify on several deadly fires this year.

To support our reporters, our volunteer team of engineers built new capabilities and strengthened our platform ensuring we will be able to continue providing this free resource to the community. In the last 6 months, we have:

• Scaled our infrastructure to support all 58 counties in California
• Added evacuation orders and warnings
• Added wind direction, wind speed, air quality (AQI), and historical fire perimeter layers
• Added tracking and reporting of prescribed burns
• Deployed our first 4 radio scanners in radio dead-zones

And finally, we announced our big plans to expand across the West Coast and hiring a full time staff with our $2M fundraising campaign!  The outpouring of support from the community has been nothing short of amazing but we are still only 28% of the way there.

If you feel that Watch Duty has helped you live more peacefully with wildfires, please consider donating today to help support our team for 2023. All donations are tax-deductible.

Donate Today

‍