Zeus: Wildfire app brings old reporting to new climate media

Watch Duty's breaking news mission grows to 13 states, more than a million users.

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The 2021 2021 Dixie Fire in Northern California. Photo: Cal Fire.

(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. His climate columns have appeared in USA Today, The Independent, and New Thinking magazine).

SAN FRANCISCO (Callaway Climate Insights) — When a wildfire burst out just a quarter mile from John Mills’ new home in the northern part of California’s Sonoma County in 2019, the tech entrepreneur didn’t realize he was about to create a new form of climate media. He just wanted to find out what was going on.

Yet despite his best efforts looking on the Internet and on TV and radio, Mills couldn’t find any explanation for why helicopters were circling his land, or why a retrofitted C-130 plane soon flew directly over his house and dumped a bunch of fire retardant just over the next hill.

“I didn’t know what was happening so I just grabbed a hose and started watering my house down,” said Mills, 42, a transplanted New Yorker who found success in Silicon Valley before buying 170 acres near Healdsburg, Calif. “There was nothing on the news. Nothing on Twitter or the internet. Zero.”