Trying to be safe in a wildfire? There is an app that can help

On January 9, 2025By Littum

As climate change contributes to longer wildfire seasons and increases the likelihood of devastating fires, more people in western states are finding themselves looking for local wildfire information. But finding accurate, specific, and timely information can be challenging, especially in the midst of an emergency.

“The world has now come to expect Twitters and TikToks and push notifications, and the world of technology has overtaken this community of first responders and firefighters and emergency managers,” said John Mills, co-founder and CEO of See Dutyan app launched in 2021 that has been gaining popularity as more and more people look to their phones for wildfire information.

“It really starts to blow up as the fires explode,” says Mills, whose app saw one increase in downloads in early September, while three large fires raged in the mountains around Los Angeles. “The sad part is that it means things are really going to be extraordinarily bad when that happens.”

A firehose of information

During a wildfire, this information can come from many sources: emergency push notifications from county emergency managers, texts and emails from the sheriff’s department, social media posts from local, state and federal fire officials, and websites such as Inciwebwhich maps fire lines.

Mills, a Silicon Valley tech guy who lives off the grid in the woods of Sonoma County, experienced this jumble of information after a close run-in with 2020’s Wallbridge Fire — part of a particularly bad summer of wildfires across the West Coast, where 33 people was killed in California. Mills realized, “You know, it’s only a matter of time before it comes back to me.”

He realized he could do something about it—by building an app that would integrate all these sources of wildfire information and make it easily accessible on smartphones.

“Hey, I live in the woods, I’m going to die, this is going to launch tomorrow,” Mills remembers thinking during that wildfire. “So we built Watch Duty in 80 days and got it live and had 50,000 users in a week.”

The app started relatively small, tracking fires across just three Northern California counties, but in four years it has grown to include the entire American West, Texas and Oklahoma.

New technology, old techniques

Watch Duty does not collect or sell user data. The basic version is free to download, and the non-profit that makes it is funded through donations and subscriptions to advanced and pro versions.

The app draws from various official sources for information about wildfires.

Still, its strength comes from a small army of volunteer contributors and staff reporters with firefighting, emergency dispatch and journalism experience who watch live streams from wildland cameras and listen to firefighter radio communications in the field.

Michael Silvester is one of those contributors — a staff reporter who started out as a volunteer. He often takes the Watch Duty night shift and broadcasts live updates on active fires from his home across the Pacific, where he started as a radio scanner at a young age.

“My father was a volunteer firefighter here in New Zealand,” he says. “I used it as a way to keep track of him on calls and stuff.”

Silvester says one day he became curious to see how much he could learn about wildfires in California, an entire hemisphere away, just by listening to live-streamed firefighter radio channels online. It turns out a lot – and his Twitter handle @CAFireScanner was born.

“Someone said I saved their life one day,” Silvester says quietly. “They didn’t know the hill was on fire until they saw the message on Twitter.”

Now he performs the same service on Watch Duty, which he says is a better platform to get the right information into the right hands.

“When you follow people like me on Twitter, you kind of get everything I post. Is it going to be a fire in Southern California? Is it going to be a fire in Siskiyou County all the way across the state?” he describes.

“With Watch Duty, you can subscribe by county. It’s targeted information – it’s delivered to you.”

“This is a real-time, 24-hour operation,” says CEO Mills. “We talk to you through an app; we talk to you through your phones. But actually we listen to radios, a 100-year-old technology,” he explains. “That’s really where you find the most up-to-date, real-time intelligence. Because it’s actually the firefighters doing the work at that moment.”

A ‘fantastic tool’ as part of a toolbox

“Watch Duty has definitely filled a gap,” says Karen Hancock, public information officer and Community Outreach Specialist for the Sonoma County Fire District, one of the first counties covered by the app when it launches in 2021.

“It’s been a great tool for not only our public, but our firefighters and crews,” she says.

The community of Hancock is no stranger to wildfires. In 2017, the fast-moving Tubbs Fire swept through the Coffey Park neighborhood in the middle of the night without warning, killing 22 people and burning over 5,000 buildings. Back then it was most destructive fire in California history, but it quickly became the second most devastating Campfire raged through the town of Paradise a year later.

“We’ve learned that redundancy is really important,” says Hancock, whose job it is to help community members stay prepared with the latest information. “But a lot of times we’re in the field and we just can’t get it out fast enough because our hands are just so busy at that moment.”

CalFire, the California State Wildfire Agency, warns that there are “potential risks associated with sharing inaccurate information inadvertently.” In a statement to NPR, CalFire said they prefer people visit their website for information and that platforms like Watch Duty “should not be considered official sources of information.”

Hancock says she always recommends Watch Duty along with more traditional sources of information like local emergency notifications. “It’s just another tool, another way to get the information out there,” she points out.

“There’s not that many of us first responders, and even a smaller handful of us, that have the ability to put out the communications, you know, through social media or just the critical alerts that go out,” Hancock explains. “Having another resource that reaches so many in the community – it’s lifesaving.”