'Right thing at all costs': Bay Area app thrives amid Palisades Fire

Devastating fires in Los Angeles County that began Tuesday when an intense windstorm met Southern California’s arid conditions have charred neighborhoods, killed five people and prompted more than 100,000 evacuations. When a destructive blaze encroaches, it’s vital to get fast, high-quality information about the fire’s size and direction. And to find it, about 1.4 million new users flocked to Watch Duty in a 48-hour stretch between Tuesday and Thursday, founder John Mills told SFGATE.

Watch Duty, free to use and built by Mills’ Santa Rosa-based nonprofit, is an all-in-one tool for monitoring wildfires. Available as an app (iOS and Google Play) or on a website, Watch Duty provides a map showing fire perimeters, evacuation zones, red flag warnings and shelter locations. Selectable layers also link to on-the-ground camera feeds from ALERT California and show air quality and surface wind data. For each fire, feeds of live updates from the nonprofit’s reporters include notable shifts in the blaze, firefighting measures and local closures. Paid versions of Watch Duty, for firefighters and emergency managers, include a flight tracker for firefighting planes and additional map types.

The main map platform is Watch Duty’s most obvious service, compiling information from local fire departments, Cal Fire, forestry services and other official sources. But what sets the app apart, in Mills’ eyes, is the nonprofit’s team of paid reporters and more than 150 volunteers. Those workers listen to first-responder radio traffic to gauge local firefighting efforts and get real-time news; Mills said, “We hear the dirt, when it really happens.” Sometimes, the platform shows acreage updates before they land on Cal Fire’s website.

The huge influx of new users — which included 600,000 in one 12-hour stretch, per Mills — has Watch Duty’s engineers pulling all-nighters and throwing new hardware online to handle demand. Mills said Watch Duty’s app and website have fielded as many as 30,000 requests per second this week.

Though the Palisades and Eaton Fires, along with smaller blazes around Los Angeles’ sprawling metro area, are “particularly devastating,” in Mills’ words, tracking high-impact wildfires is “business as usual” for Watch Duty as climate change boosts fire risks. 

“Unfortunately, as my friends like to remind me jokingly, I'm in a growing industry — which is the sad part,” Mills said. “For me, it’s my coping mechanism. It's how I can do something to help, rather than just sit there and watch the world burn.”

Mills, a former Silicon Valley founder and executive, moved off the grid to the Sonoma County forest in 2019, he said on the All Things Wildfire podcast. A small fire near his ranch — put out by planes without any mention in the media — awoke him to gaps in fire coverage from government agencies and press outlets. 

When the Walbridge Fire started in those same hills less than a year later, Mills evacuated to Santa Rosa, and spent “all day and all night” listening to radio channels and crawling the internet, learning everything he could about the blaze’s progress over eight days. The fire scorched 55,000 acres, running right up to the edge of Mills’ property. 

He told SFGATE on Thursday that the best information he found, during those frightening days in 2020, was coming from people who spent their free time listening to radio scanners and spreading it on social media. Mills founded Watch Duty in 2021; many of those same people are now employees or volunteers for the nonprofit, he said.

In four years, Watch Duty has ballooned in size and scope. Per the nonprofit’s annual report, the user base jumped from 1.9 million in 2023 to 7.2 million in 2024, and the nonprofit doubled its staff and volunteer head counts. The app now runs for every western state except Alaska. Last year $5.6 million in funding poured in, including a $2 million grant from Google.org. The nonprofit kept expenses below $2.5 million, in part, Mills said, by not having an office. Still, they aren’t skimping on salaries; Mills said he wants to normalize nonprofits paying high-dollar salaries to get “the best talent in the world.” 

Amid the high-profile blazes this week, the app won a spate of endorsements on social media. Actor Kumail Nanjiani suggested his LA-area followers download Watch Duty to receive alerts. Ryan Petersen, CEO of San Francisco logistics startup Flexport, praised the app’s “granular” information. And Meredith Whittaker, president of encrypted messaging nonprofit Signal, contrasted Watch Duty with social media platforms and paywalled news sites, encouraging her followers to donate to the nonprofit. 

Mills’ ambitions for the service are grand. He wants to include more than wildfires, and expand beyond the United States after becoming the go-to “disaster platform” nationwide. 

“The organization's goal is life and safety,” the CEO said. “You can see that in our product when you sign up. We don't ask for your email, your phone number. We don't spam you, we don't message you, we don't track you. We are trying to do the right thing at all costs.”

Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.