My guest today is Dave Merritt, cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Watch Duty.

Founded in 2021, Watch Duty is a nonprofit emergency-information platform that provides real-time, verified intelligence about wildfires and floods across all 50 states. Its network of active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, first responders, and reporters monitors radio traffic, satellites, cameras, weather data, and official sources to give people information they can act on—often in the critical period before traditional emergency communications catch up. Today, Watch Duty serves more than 16 million active users annually.

Building technology people rely on during a disaster raises profound questions about trust: How do you move information quickly without sacrificing accuracy? How much uncertainty should you expose to the public? What should we automate—and what decisions still require human judgment? And what happens when a nonprofit technology platform begins functioning as critical public infrastructure?

Dave Merritt has spent roughly fifteen years building software and scalable technology systems, and today leads the technical architecture behind Watch Duty.  

In our conversation, we talk about what technological infrastructure looks like when wildfire risk has increasingly become part of the background condition of everyday life. When a fire does start, one of the most consequential questions is also one of the simplest: What is actually happening, and what do I need to do?

Watch Duty was built to answer that question.

Watch Duty is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations and volunteers. To support Watch Duty as a donor or. volunteer, please visit watchdutz.org.