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

Launched in 2021, Watch Duty combines publicly available maps of fire incidents and evacuation orders and warning zones – similar to those found on the Cal Fire website – with shelter locations, National Weather Service warnings, and real-time text, photos and video updates, with the option to receive notifications about specific incidents or to deactivate them.

According to CEO John Mills, Watch Duty, which had 7.2 million annual active users at the end of 2024, has already added 600,000 new users in the last 24 hours.

“What’s happening in LA right now is the worst thing 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 do this than do nothing. It feels like we can at least do something to help, because otherwise we’ll just sit here and watch 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 approximately 200 volunteers, including active and retired firefighters and dispatchers.

The Watch Duty team receives automatic notifications sent to their Slack platform when an emergency fire call is made. According to Watch Duty’s website, the team is monitoring information about the fire by listening to radio scanners, watching trail cameras and satellites, and following official announcements from law enforcement and fire services and other public sources. Watch Duty said it would notify the affected population through its app “if we perceive a threat to life or property.”

For example, as of Wednesday morning, users tracking the Palisades Fire could find reports from Watch Duty staff reporter Cole Euken about the eastern extent of the fire and see a recent image of Topanga Peak to the west.

Who is behind Watch Duty?

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

Mills, who runs Sherwood, spent his career in Silicon Valley and sold his food service software company in 2022.

In 2020, Mills decided to move to the woods in Sonoma County. During his first month there, he saw planes and helicopters flying over his home as his neighbor’s ranch caught fire. Mills said he received no warning or warning. During the 2020 Walbridge fire that ended at the corner of his property, Mills said he followed people who had set up pages on social media sites like Facebook to let others know about the fires in their communities.

What if there was a way to make such contributions more widely available, Mills wondered. He began envisioning an app that would act as a “megaphone” to spread the information to his community and founded Watch Duty, which launched in 2021. Some of the people monitoring fires joined Mills in his efforts to develop 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 some tech bro from Silicon Valley. “I wasn’t here to make money off the disaster and I lived here,” Mills said. “It took a while for everyone to trust me.”

Watch Duty was first available in Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties. Watch Duty notifications about school and hospital evacuation 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 does not intend to sell any personal information about its users to 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 simultaneously and a fire department flight tracker. The app also accepts donations.

Mills said Watch Duty raised $2 million in membership fees 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. Watch Duty hopes to explore the use of other types of data such as river levels, tsunami buoys and earthquakes in the future.

“This has become a way of life for us and the way we fight fires and survive natural disasters,” Mills said.

And he has no plans to leave his home in the woods, even as more fires break out in California.

“I’m not going. I had a choice – I could fight or run, and five years later I still enjoy fighting,” Mills said.

Matt Brennan, Times deputy entertainment and arts editor, contributed to this report.