The Everything app for natural disasters.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

During last year's massive wildfires in Los Angeles, residents and firefighters turned to one app to get up-to-date information, watch duty.

The nonprofit was started by a small team of software engineers who experienced wildfires in the Bay Area.

They wanted to create a user-friendly resource that brings

together public data from a number of different sources, weather forecasts, emergency dispatches

from different agencies. It all gets mapped in real-time in the app, which also sends out alerts

to users. Since the LA fires, the organization, and the

service has grown considerably. We brought back David Merritt, chief technology officer at

watch duty, to talk about all the new updates. The fires in January of last year were horrific,

and we were really proud to meet the moment there and be able to help L.A.

And because of that, we had a lot of publicity. We had a lot of interest in what our service was doing.

And this kind of brought us a new level of visibility in the national conversation. And that's helped propel our growth quite a bit in the past

18 months. What that's meant is we've expanded to all 50 states. We did that in December of last year.

And we just rolled out the expansion into covering life-threatening and critical flooding events.

What we want to do is provide that level of guidance and synthesis on what's coming out of the

National Weather Service and what's coming out of rain gauges and what's coming out of

the variety of kind of inputs and information that people might be receiving and give it to them

as quickly as possible. But with a human in the loop.

Were there any unique sort of technical challenges with integrating flood data versus how you track wildfires?

I think on our side, a lot of the technical challenge was around some of the geospatial differences.

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