What you need to know about the Watch Duty app amid the Eaton, Palisades fires

As fires in LA County continue to wreak havoc, a fire tracking app run by a Bay Area nonprofit is gaining popularity.

Launching in 2021, Watch Duty combines publicly available maps of fire incidents and evacuation orders and warning zones — similar to what can be found on the Cal Fire website — with shelter locations, National Weather Service warnings and real-time text, photo and video updates with the ability to to receive or disable notifications about specific events.

Watch Duty, which counted 7.2 million annual active users by 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 LA is the worst I’ve seen in the five years I’ve been doing this… It’s catastrophic,” Mills told The Times. “It’s really hard to watch, but I’d rather do this than do nothing. 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 statesincluding California. Watch Duty has 15 employees and works with about 200 volunteers, including active and retired firefighters and coordinators.

The Watch Duty team gets automatic alerts sent to its Slack platform when a 911 dispatch call is made regarding a fire. The team is monitoring information about the fire, listening to radio scanners, looking at wildlife cameras and satellites, and following official announcements from law enforcement and fire departments and other public sources, according to See 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, users tracking the Palisades fire, e.g. find dispatches from Watch Duty reporter Cole Euken on the eastern extent of the fire and see a current photo looking from Topanga Peak to the west.

Who is behind Watch Duty?

The app is run by the Santa Rosa-based nonprofit Sherwood Forestry Service, named after the forest where Robin Hood roamed.

Mills, who heads Sherwood, spent his career in Silicon Valley and sold his foodservice software company in 2022.

In 2020, Mills decided to move to the woods in Sonoma County. In his first month there, he watched planes and helicopters fly over his home as his neighbor’s ranch caught fire. Mills said he did not receive a warning or warning. During the 2020 Walbridge fire, which ended up on the corner of his property, Mills said he followed people who had set up social media pages like Facebook to notify others of 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 envisioning an app that would act as a “megaphone” to relay the information to his community and created Watch Duty, which launched in 2021. Some of the people who watched fires joined Mills in his efforts to to build the app, and when they told their audience about it, Watch Duty’s popularity blossomed.

“It started with me convincing them that I wasn’t a Silicon Valley techie. I wasn’t here to cash in on disasters, and I also lived here,” Mills said. “It took me a while to get everyone to trust me.”

Watch Duty was first available in Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties. Watch Duty alerts to evacuate 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 has no intention of selling personal information about its users to any outside third parties.

If users want additional features, they can purchase a membership starting 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 has no plans 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 entertainment and arts editor Matt Brennan contributed to this report.