Wildfire Data, With Its Hair on Fire

The Watch Duty app uses a wider source of U.S. wildfire data than is typically available from federal and state sources. Above, a screenshot showing a range of fire-related incidents in the continental United States in mid-August. Image: Watch Duty.

Reporter’s Toolbox: Wildfire Data, With Its Hair on Fire

By Joseph A. Davis

If you are an environmental journalist in the U.S. West, covering wildfires may be a common chore. Watch Duty is a data app that will rescue you.

Not always “data” data, it is still a fire hose of critical information. It will repay your efforts to discover it. SEJournal has, over the years, offered many resources for covering wildfires. But we neglected this one. It is one of the best. Start exploring it here.

Watch Duty is a nongovernmental nonprofit staffed by experienced disaster professionals, tech professionals and volunteers. It is funded by paid memberships and grants. You can get the basic info for free. It has a huge user base and gets massive online traffic. 

If someone in your audience (or you) owns a cozy hideaway in some mountain forest, you need it — because government notification systems don’t always work. Toolbox observes that President Donald Trump is reorganizing federal wildfire response. Hideaway owners may want to pay the $24.99 for a yearly membership.

And you can get it on your smartphone as you are racing toward the fire. Or away from it.

Where the data comes from

The data is sourced from all over: radio scanners, cameras, satellites and other public sources such as official announcements from law enforcement and local government. That includes the agencies actually fighting the fire and managing the disaster response. 

It’s a wider array of information than you get from typical federal and state sources.

 

It’s high-quality data of

exceptional timeliness

— critical if you want

to survive a fire.

 

And it’s high-quality data of exceptional timeliness — critical if you want to survive a fire (or the fact-checkers, given that chaos and surprise are often characteristic of disasters). Among other sources, it has volunteers listening to firefighters’ radio. When the evacuation order comes, you will get it on your cellphone.

How many layers do you want?

Alerts on your cellphone are just a starting point. Reporters doing data projects may want to know more — like where the nursery schools and senior homes are. Or whether people should evacuate. Or where the shelters for evacuees are. Or what power outages to expect even before the fire gets there.

You can even track the flight plans of firefighting aircraft. Or fire weather, red flag warnings and weather stations.

Do you have asthma? Ever seen the sky turn orange? Watch Duty also includes data on wildfire smoke and air quality. 

What’s unique about Watch Duty is not just the wide variety of information it includes, but the effectiveness of how it integrates all this information. The map format is key. A recent news flash is that they are developing a similar utility for flooding.

As always, we urge you to get out there and observe the event and talk to people of all walks about how they are experiencing fire. Get your own scanner. Bring a mask. And put your own safety first. Before you go in, have a plan for getting out.

[Editor’s Note: The wildfire Topic on the Beat page, mentioned above, has nearly two dozen SEJournal stories on the subject, including additional Toolboxes on data mapping of the urban-wildland interface and potential wildfire hazards, and on data sets to track wildfire smoke and its respiratory health risks, as well as a broad range of data sources. Plus, get wildfire headlines from EJToday.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 29. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.