Did you know that Watch Duty was the most downloaded iOS app during recent wildfires? We wondered why, so we invited Nick Russell, VP, Operations at Watch Duty, to come on the Grid Forward Forum podcast. Talking with Bryce Yonker, executive director and CEO of Grid Forward, Nick explained the history of the app and how it helps local responders and utilities before, during and after a disaster strikes.
For our grid community, we were especially interested in his take on the emerging role of AI for improving situational awareness. We excerpted his remarks below, lightly edited for clarity.
But the whole conversation is fascinating so listen to the entire podcast here or on Apple, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and most other popular podcast platforms.
Even better, we are excited to have Nick presenting in person at our upcoming symposium Standing Up to Wildfire: Practical Tips and Tactics for Utilities, coming to Portland on June 4, 2025. Get the details and start the registration process on our Wildfire Symposium web page.
Bryce Yonker: I’ve seen a number of [AI] capabilities for advanced monitoring, image recognition, advanced forecasting, and some others that seem to show some real promise with regard to dealing with wildfire. How do you all see this evolving? Are there some advanced capabilities leveraging machine learning outcomes that you think are exciting and are going to take us to another level of capability?
Nick Russell: AI has a mixed bag of offerings. Some of them positive, some of them introducing new challenges that we are aware and are not aware of yet. I think the most powerful thing I’ve seen in the utility stakeholder space is camera networks, right? Take California, for an example: 1297 cameras on mountaintops and valleys throughout the state with a very high percentage of coverage. Those cameras are available through Alert California, Alert West outside of the state of California, and that network is building constantly. That allows for real time situational awareness.
But when you start thinking about 1,297 cameras in California, and 8,000 plus cameras in the United States, all under the same umbrella of Alert West, how do you look at that many things? And that’s where AI comes in. But there’s diligence, right? Because AI has come a tremendous stride in the last handful of years. But are we ready to trust it with emergency response 100% yet? It requires human validation. And I think that people in this space who have added that into their workflow.
Alert West [is] the example of this because they have thousands of cameras out there that are all feeding alerts back to a human run center that then validates that and issues an alert to a utility for a fire that’s inside of an area of interest to first responders through the apps to get a response and route to these things… Last year in California, that beat 911 calls 31% of the time in early suppression leads to the less chances of a large, devastating wildfire. So that’s an excellent example of AI.
Bryce Yonker: Great. You’ve mentioned situational awareness a couple times. What does that mean to you, and how do we get better at it with regards to what’s going on around wildfire risk?
Nick Russell: Situational awareness is a toolbox that seems to get heavier and heavier… With each month, there’s another tool coming out another tool. And so that’s really been a point of focus for us. As more tools come out, we want to continue to aggregate those, whether we’re using them on the back end, or we’re showing them to our users. They’re all great tools in different respects, and they all have positive and wins in different regional, you know, geographic areas as well as different fields that they operate in. And so I think there’s a ton happening all at once. There’s a lot of duplicative efforts. There’s a lot of neat efforts happening from new constellations and low Earth orbit satellites to monitor detections.
But situational awareness comes with openness because when we have all these efforts happening in their silos that require a username and password to get into or approval, it becomes challenging to share across stakeholders regardless of who they are. So our mission is to keep things open and free.
We do, of course, have some paid levels that support keeping the app free, but the people that we make strategic partnerships with are those of the same mindset, those who have websites that you can go on and see all of the infrastructure they’ve deployed and that can be shared across stakeholders. And I think that’s really important. When we think about situational awareness, it means aggregation, and it means openness.
Listen to the entire podcast here or on Apple, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and most other popular podcast platforms.
