Watch Duty is a fantastic community powered app for monitoring on wildfires and flooding in real time. I use it all the time but especially when I am out in the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains or plains of New Mexico.

T-Satellite is a Starlink powered LTE from space service from T-Mobile (this is not an ad but it’s useful). The service allows for a whitelisted set of apps to be used (SMS, Weather, various mapping apps, Whatsapp etc.) while outside of regular terrestrial phone coverage.

Watch Duty does not seem to be one of these whitelisted apps (at the moment, I hope that someday it will be covered). But something interesting that does work is notifications.

If you set up notifications for the county/counties that you’re in, then the notifications for fire/flood updates can still come through (at least on Android). You can read the text notification but that’s where it ends, this is still at least better than nothing.

It goes without saying that this is just an observation from someone without any direct debugging access to either of these systems, so don’t rely on what I am saying here!