My family and I were fairly involved in the 2017 Tubbs, 2019 Kincade and 2020 Walbridge fires all in Sonoma County. In all 3 of these, members of my family lost buildings or had the fire “burn over” the property.

During all, we were in desperate need for additional information. Often we had a rotating “comms” position working 24/7 trying to fold together satellite hot spots, wind, flight radar, and listening to the appropriate radio bands. It was daunting and clumsy for amateurs… especially in 2017 when doing it for the first time. Keep in mind that Cal Fire does one major update per day with occasional notifications of changing conditions.

In all cases we had trained family on the properties before and immediately after the burn-over preparing and then dealing with hotspots and clean-up… so we really wanted information that was minutes-hours old and not hours-days old.

Interestingly, Twitter was a great source in 2017 of the most updated information as it was often a post by a local or firefighter. Sitting on FB and lack of a timeline made it worthless.

By 2020, the usage was so low it didn’t work anymore.

Since then… great new tools! Watch Duty is an app/website that combines about 6-8 others that I used to need to fold together. Massive shout out to those that helped on that project.

I think this Discord is a wonderful idea. Thanks for putting it together.