If you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indices, wind direction, and a host of other information that everyone from firefighters to regular people. , have come to support themselves during this week’s historic and devastating fires.
Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can provide that information. The app itself has taken off, climbing to the top of the Apple and Google app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it in the last few days alone.
The elegance of the app lies in its simplicity. It does not delete user data, display ads, require any kind of login, or track your information. Its simple technology staff and user interface – most of which are maintained by engineers and volunteer reporters – have likely helped save countless lives. While Watch Duty is free to use, the app accepts tax-deductible donations and offers two membership levels that unlock additional features, such as a flight tracker for firefighters and the ability to set alarms for more than four counties.
With plans to expand the service across the United States, as well as overseas and into other emergency services, Watch Duty could eventually replace some of the slowest and least reliable local government alert systems for millions of people .
Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images
An app born of fire
The idea for Watch Duty came to co-founder John Mills while he was trying to protect his off-grid Sonoma County home from the Walbridge fire in 2020. He realized there wasn’t a single source for all the information people needed to was protected from the fire, which eventually killed 33 people and destroyed 156 houses. John and his friend David Merritt, who is co-founder and CTO of Watch Duty, decided to build an app to help.
“It came from an idea that John had and he told me about it four years ago,” says Merritt. threshold. “We built the app in 60 days and it was completely volunteer-run, with no full-time staff. It was a side project for a lot of engineers, so the goal was to keep it as simple as possible.”
Fire reporting is patchy at best in fire-prone areas and is often shared across platforms like Facebook and X, where fire departments and counties have vetted pages that share relevant updates. But increasingly, social media platforms are putting automated access to alert services behind paywalls. Governments also use a wide variety of warning systems, causing delays that can cost lives, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires that have forced the evacuation of more than 180,000 people. And sometimes, these government-directed alerts are sent by mistake, causing mass confusion.
Watch Duty simplifies everything for millions of people.
“We see what we’re doing as a public service,” Merritt says. “It is a service that everyone should have, timely information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very scattered. Even the best-intentioned agencies themselves have their hands tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We partner with government resources focused on firefighting.”
“We see what we’re doing as a public service.”
One of the biggest issues about wildfires, in particular, is that they can move quickly and consume large areas of land and structures in minutes. For example, the winds that pushed the Palisades fire to spread to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 miles per hour on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the piecemeal signaling system that replaces Watch Duty can cause delays that cost lives.
“Some of the delivery systems for push notifications and text messages that government agencies use had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for a fire,” says Merritt. “We shoot to get the holiday notices in less than a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in LA are getting push notifications through the app. That’s a lot of messages to send in 60 seconds. Generally, people are getting it pretty much all at the same time.”
A simple technological stack
For Watch Duty, this type of mass communication requires reliable technology, as well as a group of dedicated staff and skilled volunteers. Merritt says Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its service.
“We shoot to get the holiday announcements in less than a minute.”
The app is built on a mix of technology, including Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heroku. Merritt says the app uses some AI, but only for internal routing of alerts and emails. Reporters on Watch Duty — the ones who listen to scanners and update the app with push notifications on everything from air spots to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.
“All information is verified for quality over quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for journalists. For example, we never report injuries or give specific addresses. It is all tailored to a specific set of criteria. We don’t do editorials. We report on what we heard on the scanners.”
According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Although it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit has slowly added more full-time people. “We still have volunteers helping us, but it’s becoming more about paid in-house staff as we grow, as things get more complex and as we have more rigorous processes,” he says.
“All information is verified for quality over quantity.”
It says it has no plans to ever charge for the app or remove user data. The approach is one of a kind Field of Dreams method to build a free app that saves people’s lives: if you build it well, the funding will come.
“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of technology does,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get information and get out. We have the option to add more photos, but we limit them to those that provide different views of a fire we have followed. We don’t want people to overturn the sentence.”
Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images
Information Gathering in the Age of Trump
Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from places like the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. If the incoming Trump administration decides to follow through on threats to dismantle and disband the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service’s parent agency, such moves will affect the Watch’s ability Duty to act.
Still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be pretty well insulated from any changes in policy,” he says. “We’re either buying that information ourselves or we’re happy to buy it, and we’ll take that cost. The fact that we will soon be covering the entire US will bear the cost of anything that changes from a policy perspective. Our operating costs are primarily salaries. We’re trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. If we need to raise a grant to buy data from the National Weather Service, then we will.”
Regardless of what the next administration does, it’s clear that Watch Duty has become a critical and necessary app for those in Southern California right now. The app currently covers 22 states and plans to roll out nationwide soon.
“We got 1.4 million app downloads in the last few days,” according to Merritt. “I think we only got 60 support tickets, so that shows something is working there. We’re really just focused on getting that information out.”