Watch Duty adds Planet satellite imagery for enterprise users

Watch Duty has added Planet Labs satellite imagery to its enterprise platform, giving utilities and other infrastructure operators more current views of wildfire and flood risks. PG&E is the first customer to use the integration, which is designed to improve situational awareness, damage assessment, and response planning.

Why it matters: - Utilities, telecom operators, and other critical infrastructure managers need fresher imagery to make faster wildfire and flood decisions. - The new integration gives Watch Duty enterprise users access to more current satellite views than older mapping products that can trail by months or years. - Better visibility into vegetation, fuel loads, road conditions, burn scars, and flood damage can improve de-energization calls, field coordination, and restoration planning.

What happened: - Watch Duty announced new enterprise features through an integration with Planet Labs PBC. - The feature makes Planet’s high-resolution weekly satellite mosaics available as a map layer inside Watch Duty’s enterprise environment. - PG&E is the first adopter of the integration. - The feature is available to any Watch Duty and Planet enterprise customer.

The details: - Watch Duty overlays Planet satellite imagery with incident data on wildfires and major floods, human-validated reporting, and enterprise asset mapping. - The combined view strengthens pre- and post-incident situational awareness for infrastructure customers. - Enterprise users get more current vegetation and fuel-load visibility. - The system also improves awareness of infrastructure corridors. - Higher-resolution imagery can support burn-scar assessment after fires and flood-damage assessment after storms. - Those capabilities could speed post-event damage restoration planning. - PG&E uses the integration inside Watch Duty’s common operating picture. - PG&E teams can assess vegetation conditions, identify terrain changes, evaluate road and route changes, and support incident investigations alongside distribution and transmission line layers. - PG&E said access to more current satellite imagery helps its teams build a more complete picture and strengthen wildfire mitigation efforts.

Between the lines: - The deal reflects growing demand for near-real-time geospatial intelligence as wildfire seasons become longer and more destructive. - Watch Duty is positioning its nonprofit public safety platform as an enterprise tool for infrastructure operators that need operational context, not just alerts. - Planet gains a practical use case that ties its daily Earth-imaging business to utility risk management. - The integration could broaden from monitoring into mapping, analysis, and other disaster-response applications.

What's next: - Watch Duty and Planet expect to add more capabilities over time, including enhanced mapping, analysis, and broader disaster-response uses. - The companies will likely use PG&E’s deployment as a model for other enterprise customers in utilities and telecom. - More information is available through Planet’s website, and Watch Duty’s public-service platform continues to serve wildfire and flood monitoring across all 50 states.

The bottom line: - Watch Duty is turning its emergency intelligence platform into a more actionable enterprise product by pairing on-the-ground wildfire reporting with fresher satellite imagery from Planet.