Everyone's installed Watch Duty
I've been using the Watch Duty app to track the wildfires in the LA area for the last week or so, and it's pretty good. Maybe I don't have a great relationship with it, but the APP is good.
Everyone is using it now. It's like we all suddenly joined the same new social media site or some shit. I feel like everyone I talk to about the fire ends up talking about this site.
It's a nonprofit wildfire tracking app that collates a lot of different public data sources to give you a pretty good visual overlay of every kind of red flag/burn area/evac order data you might want. It also incorporates fire view photos from users, in a few cases. The updates it provides on fires are consistent and informative but not overly so. For example, last Wednesday it was giving me updates on the Palisades fire around once an hour or two, it felt like - not constantly, but often enough to stay useful in a rapidly changing situation.
It's definitely possible to use it unhealthily, though! I don't know if it's good or bad that I've been looking at it so much. My house is not near the fire. Some really nice bike trails are, though. I have been looking at those trails obsessively, hoping they don't ALL burn up. I know people who were looking at the app a lot more unhealthily than I was... I might have been one of the least-dire mishandlers of this information, haha.
Watch Duty will also ping you about new fires in the area. That's the reason I knew some friends of mine were close enough to the Sunset fire that they might need help or a place to stay. We were able to get them on our couch that night. But it's also telling me about fires that are fully, like, 50 miles away from me, and now I get to worry about them too. This is probably not normal for most people using the app... but we had five fires going at one point last week. That's a lot of data to dwell on.
I do not use apps like Nextdoor or Citizen, because they rot your fucking brain, but this app is more immediately useful because it's actual government agency data and evac information and it's not designed to absorb all your attention (unless you are stuck in a city that is burning in five places at once). If you're in the areas they serve and have friends, family, or property near wild spaces, I'd suggest keeping it installed during fire season. (I'd also suggest practicing some of the self-restraint I did not.)