As L.A. County fires continue to wreak havoc, a fire-tracking app run by a Bay Area nonprofit is gaining popularity.
Watch Duty, launched in 2021, combines publicly available maps of fire incidents and evacuation order and warning zones — similar to what can be found on the Cal Fire website — with shelter locations, National Weather Service alerts and real-time text, photo and video updates, with the option to receive or turn off notifications about specific incidents.
Watch Duty, which counted 7.2 million yearly active users at the end of 2024, has already added 600,000 new users in the last 24 hours, according to CEO John Mills.
“What’s happening right now in L.A. is the worst that I’ve seen in the five years I’ve been doing this … This is catastrophic,” Mills told The Times. “It’s really hard to watch, but I’d rather be doing this than not doing anything. It feels like we could at least do something to help, because otherwise we’re just sitting here watching the world burn.”
What is the Watch Duty app?
The app provides real-time updates on fires in 22 states, including California. Watch Duty has 15 employees and works with roughly 200 volunteers, including active and retired firefighters and dispatchers.
The Watch Duty team gets automated alerts that are sent to its Slack platform when a 911 dispatch call is made regarding a fire. The team monitors information about the fire, listening to radio scanners, looking at wildlife cameras and satellites and following official announcements from law enforcement and fire services and other public sources, according to Watch Duty’s website. Watch Duty said it will notify affected members of the public through its app “if we perceive a threat to life or property.”
As of Wednesday morning, for instance, users tracking the Palisades fire could find dispatches from Watch Duty staff reporter Cole Euken on the eastern extent of the fire and see a current picture looking from Topanga Peak west.
Who is behind Watch Duty?
The app is run by Santa Rosa-based nonprofit Sherwood Forestry Service, named for the forest where Robin Hood roamed.
Mills, who leads Sherwood, spent his career in Silicon Valley, selling his food service software company in 2022.
In 2020, Mills decided to move to the woods in Sonoma County. In his first month there, he saw planes and helicopters flying above his home, as his neighbor’s ranch was on fire. Mills said he didn’t receive an alert or warning. During the 2020 Walbridge Fire, which ended at the corner of his property, Mills said he followed people who had set up pages on social media sites like Facebook to notify others about what was happening with fires in their communities.
What if there was a way to make such posts more widely available, Mills asked himself. He began to imagine an app that would act as a “megaphone” to disseminate the information to his community and created Watch Duty, which launched in 2021. Some of the people who monitored fires joined Mills in his effort to build the app, and when they told their audience about it, Watch Duty‘s popularity blossomed.
“It started with me convincing them I was not a Silicon Valley tech bro. I was not here to make money on disaster and I lived here too,” Mills said. “It took me a little while to get everyone to trust me.”
Watch Duty was first available in Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties. Watch Duty alerts about the evacuation of schools and hospitals during the Cache fire helped the app grow to 50,000 users in its first week. “It just exploded from there and it’s been a meteoric rise ever since,” Mills said.
How is Watch Duty funded?
Watch Duty is free and said it does not intend to sell personal information on its users to any outside third-parties.
If users want additional features, they can buy a membership that starts at $24.99, which includes alerts for more than four counties at once and a firefighting flight tracker. The app also accepts donations.
Mills said Watch Duty has raised $2 million in membership dues, and another $600,000 in donations and grants totaling $3 million, including one from Google.org.
What’s next for Watch Duty?
The app plans to expand the types of disasters it monitors, starting with floods in the next month or two. In the future, Watch Duty hopes to explore the use of other types of data, such as river gauges, tsunami buoys and earthquakes.
“This has become a way of life for us, and how we fight fire and survive through natural disasters,” Mills said.
And he does not plan to leave his home in the woods, even with the growth of fires in California.
“I’m not leaving. I had a choice — I could fight or I could run, and five years later, I’m still enjoying the fight,” Mills said.
The Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and the arts Matt Brennan contributed to this report.
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