Wildfires Near Me? if you live in an area where there are forest fires you probably have a situation similar to this where maybe you smell smoke in the air maybe you see smoke in the distance or maybe even just see a forest fire on TV and you want to get more information you look online and the information is scattered all over Why You Need Watch Duty the place that's where watch Duty comes in you can access it on the web or by downloading an app for Android or iOS it's actually a nonprofit and in a nutshell what this does is it consolidates all the information available about a fire and puts it into one package for you so you can go to one place and see exactly what's going on with a fire and it's not AI or some bot that's doing it it's actual human beings who are monitoring all the different sources whether it be online or scanners or satellite imagery official sources How Watch Duty Consolidates Information and they're vetting it consolidating it and putting it into one package so you can just click on a fire and get all the up toate information there and I'm going to show you what exactly it is in a second but it's important to know that this is only available right now in the Availability in Western U.S. western states in the United States maybe it'll be available in more places but this is where a lot of the fires happen so makes sense so here's the main web interface and you can see by the icons you can get an idea of what it means you don't really need a key or a legend but if you do there's one up here and it tells you the containment levels based on the icons or whether it's a prescribed fire and then down here if we go into an individual fire and you just Watch Duty Interface Overview click on that fire it gives you all the information curated and put together by human beings about the fire here are evacuation orders and it even has these evacuation order uh areas right here you could see them in there if you go in here you could see it lays out where those places are so if you think you might be in them it's all tied together and you can click on the the uh the fire as well to get an outline of what the fire is evacuation warning Evacuation Orders and Shelters notes worth mentioning too I mentioned this was a nonprofit you can uh use this for free if you want to support them you can donate or you can just get a membership which gets you some extra features and if you're a professional uh land manager or firefighter you can get a more hardcore uh subscription there as well but what I'm showing you right here is all free now underneath the fire here we go back over here you could see there is a timeline of updates just like you would see on social media this is curated by a staff reporter here they have information from trans which is the Updates and User Submissions road uh you know the the the highway department here in California and if you go through there are all different uh updates here here is a User submitted photo you can go into the app and take a photo and report on the fire as well and if we go into a different fire unfortunately I have a lot of fires to choose from here you could see there are Incorporated tweets and other social media uh posts where you can actually watch the information there so it's all Integrated Social Media and Live Cameras together in one place um curated by a human being so very cool let's go back to line fire for a second now in the line fire I mentioned the evacuation orders if you want to know where to go you can click on shelters and it tells you where the shelters are and if I zoom out on here the shelters are also on the map there's the shelter so it's really neat you can get directions you can share it and then you can just X out and go back to where you were before and there's also the IAL information from the fire if you need to call or do anything else animal shelters it's all right there this is amazing and there's even more you can go into layers over here and you can change the uh map layer Map Layers and Fire Perimeters to be satellite or topographic you can go into here and get historical fire perimeters to see where fires were in the past you can go to the satellite hotspots and you can get real life heat information heat imprints from a satellite and this is telling you the direction that the fire is moving in this is the hottest area over here you can also get live Wildfire cameras this is amazing look at this so here we are Satellite Heat Maps and Wind Direction and now all these blue dots are cameras so if I click on this one here it is it's got soot from the fire on it and there are two cameras that's the wrong one here's the right one you can see we're looking at the fire and there it is this is from Keller Peak a fire tower up by Big Bear we can go into weather there's red flag warnings these are wind warnings and then we also have the surface wind direction so this is going to tell us which way the wind is blowing so you can see the wind is blowing this back this Air Quality and Red Flag Warnings way which is I think a good thing for the fire and then we also have the air quality index that gives us the air quality obviously it's very poor uh in these areas here that are around the fire so that's watch Duty and if you get the uh Pro account you can also see Flight Path Information and Pro Features where planes are flying if you want to check the flights on your own without a paid subscription you can go to a website called Flight Radar 24 they also have an app go to the fire area and then you can click on an airplane and you can get its flight path these are planes coming in here's the fire another fire you can see it's doing circles around the fire so that's available for free in other places but for 25 bucks you can support their mission and get that on Push Alerts for County Wildfires here as well and if you go on the mobile app you can actually get an alert for the county you're in and it'll push you an alert if there's a firefighter in that county and you can also subscribe to updates for an individual fire push you alerts when something new comes up Final Thoughts and Support for Watch Duty about the fire so that's watch Duty what do you think leave me a comment spam the comments if you like this it'll help this video Get Found by other people and hopefully other people can get this app because I think it is spectacular and everyone especially if you're in a state with wildfires should have this now I'm not affiliated with them in any way I'm just a user but I want to help support them because I think this will help keep people safe I think it'll potentially save lives as well and uh Kudos watch Duty team cuz this is pretty awesome