Wind whips embers as firefighters battle a blaze in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Wilson as wildfires burn in the Los Angeles area during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, U.S. on January 9, 2025.Â
Ringo Chiu | Reuters
For nearly two years, Viktor Makarskyy has been working on an app that serves as a digital survival kit to help people in disaster zones, which are apparently becoming more numerous by the day given the pace of climate change.
He never imagined that his work and personal life would collide in such a profound way.
On Wednesday night, Makarskyy was flying home to Los Angeles from an anniversary trip with his wife to the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. An evacuation order for the Sunset fire had already been issued that extended to just a few blocks from their apartment.
The Makarskyys were terrified that the fire would reach their home before they could save their cat and collect critical items.
“It’s one thing to see pictures online,” Makarskyy told CNBC in an interview Friday, “it’s another thing to see it from the airplane window and have this multisensory experience of your cabin smelling of smoke as you land. It was like enter a war zone”.
Makarskyy is the head of technology at GOES, a startup founded in 2021 focused on providing critical health advice and services, primarily in remote areas. Aid workers and intrepid travelers can download the GOES Health app and get quick, localized advice on how to deal with insect and animal bites, altitude sickness, rashes and a host of other challenges.
Hikers can assess the risk of hypothermia and backpackers can plan how to prepare for a heat wave or figure out how to temporarily set a broken bone. All content is written or approved by wilderness medicine practitioners, and everything can be accessed offline, except for the app’s real-time weather and wildlife risk index.
Increasingly, GOES, which stands for Global Outdoor Emergency Support, is becoming important in a much more widespread way, as people in urban environments have to deal with unexpected disasters due to hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires. catastrophic. Since Jan. 6, the day before the LA fires, GOES has seen an 800% increase in usage in the area, and over the past two weeks the number of new users in California has tripled, the company said.
As of Monday, massive wildfires across LA had killed at least 24 people, wiped out entire neighborhoods and burned thousands of homes and structures. No cause has been identified for the larger fires.
The GOES team with CEO Camilo Barcenas.
Courtesy: GO
Makarskyy said he uses GOES to check air quality, national alerts, fire preparedness guides and more. When he returned home, he said, he was surprised to see that although one of the most widely used weather apps showed the air quality around Los Angeles International Airport as “moderate,” when he saw a hyperlocal, more accurate measurement of air quality using GOES, showed that the air quality was much worse.
“As the developer of this app, I knew it provided accurate latitude and longitude,” he said.
GOES is far from alone in seeing an increase in use due to increased disasters. The Watch Duty app, founded in 2021 and developed by a nonprofit group, has become virtually ubiquitous in the LA area since the wildfires. It was the top free app on iOS for most of last week and was still in the top five on Monday, providing LA residents with an accurate read of where fires are burning and spreading, which neighborhoods are in the areas of evacuation and the location of power outages. .
In a post on X on Friday, Watch Duty wrote, “Our systems remain 100% operational while our radio operators sleep in shifts and our engineers are throwing everything they have at supporting up to 100,000 requests per second with an average response time of <20 ms."
Watch Duty was developed by firefighters, dispatchers and first responders specifically to share information about wildfires. GOES, in contrast, crashed into the fire safety market.
According to the announcement of the launch of the GOES application in 2023, Dr. Grant Lipman, a former professor at Stanford Emergency Medicine and director of his wilderness medicine society, started the company “after treating a hiker in critical condition due to a rattlesnake bite” and without having “to making wilderness medicine more accessible.”
“It’s Changing Outside”
GOES co-founder and CEO Camilo Barcenas spent years in the healthcare space and worked for four years overseeing technology at Stanford Adult Hospital. In 2019, he and his team began work on the GOES project, interviewing people in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East about what would make them feel safer and more prepared when traveling off-grid.
Their understanding, he said, was that health care was “so systemically broken” that the only way it could get better is if people learned to take care of themselves first.
“We did this because we believe everyone should have this,” Barcenas said. “The outside is changing and we need to be able to understand what those risks are so we can do better.”
Barcenas said that when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September, he flew to inform residents and aid groups how they could use the platform. It’s become increasingly clear, he said, how useful the app can be when climate disasters strike.
“The LA fires highlight an acceleration of what we’ve been chasing: the democratization of wilderness medicine for urban survival,” Barcenas said. “When environmental emergencies strike, traditional emergency services and health care facilities are often overwhelmed or inaccessible.”
Firefighters continue their work on burning residential areas as wildfires continue to wreak havoc, reaching their fifth day and leaving extensive damage in residential areas in Los Angeles, California, United States on January 12, 2025.
Lokman Vural Elibol | Anatolia | Getty Images
Before arriving in LA, Makarskyy said, he prepared for his return by checking national alerts within GOES, such as advisories for high winds, air quality and the location of wildfires. Each alert came with access to content written by desert medicine practitioners on preparation and mitigation techniques.
He read “what to do in respiratory distress scenarios” about those alerts. He said he learned that N95 masks are “the only thing that can protect against particles that are so fine, so small.”
“So instead of buying regular surgical masks,” Makarskyy said, “I went ahead and bought the right product for us to keep our lungs safe in this environment.”
Makarskyy said he and his wife were lucky they didn’t have to evacuate. The fires were far enough away that they were safe, but close enough that on Friday morning they woke up to ash covering their car. The nearest fire was brought under control. Their cat was safe with them.
The GOES app has several features that are free. Users can check the air quality and risk of sunburn in their location and see if there are any extreme weather advisories. For premium access, which includes Pocket Safety Guide information, subscribers pay $6 per month or $36 per year.
Barcenas said there are many new features on the way and that the app has already evolved significantly since its launch less than two years ago.
“GOES was originally developed for outdoor adventurers to prepare for trips and manage wilderness medical emergencies with visual offline first aid guides,” said Barcenas. “Now, we’re seeing urban dwellers use it to understand their health risks in nature and navigate emergencies during environmental crises.”
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