We strongly advise all residents to download and use the Watch Duty App.
Watch Duty, the wildfire tracking and alert app, marks five years of operation this year, having launched in August 2021. In that time, it has grown from a single-county volunteer project into one of the most widely used wildfire information tools in the United States.
Origins
Watch Duty was founded by John Mills, a technologist who had recently moved to rural Sonoma County, California. During a wildfire near his home, Mills found that official updates from CAL FIRE were limited to roughly once a day, while volunteers monitoring emergency radio scanners were sharing more current information informally on social media. Mills built an app to consolidate that information into a single, publicly accessible source. It launched with a small group of volunteer “citizen information officers” — many of them former or active firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders — relaying real-time updates from radio traffic.
Growth
The app initially served Sonoma County before expanding statewide in June 2022. It has since expanded to cover most fire-prone regions of the western United States and, more recently, nationwide. Watch Duty is operated by Sherwood Forestry Service, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Santa Rosa, California. According to the organization, it reported financial figures of approximately $1.23 million in revenue and $1.01 million in expenses for 2023. By 2025, the organization had grown to 48 full-time employees and approximately 250 volunteers, who together reported on more than 13,000 wildfires that year.
The January 2025 Los Angeles Fires
Watch Duty’s highest-profile moment came during the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, including the Eaton and Palisades fires. As evacuation systems in some areas struggled with traffic volume and communication gaps, Watch Duty became the top downloaded app in the App Store, adding hundreds of thousands of new users within hours. Reporting at the time described residents relying on the app’s real-time updates to make evacuation decisions ahead of official warnings. The organization reported adding 750,000 users in a 12-hour period during the crisis, and later cited approximately 7 million active users amid record download activity in the days that followed.
How It Works
Watch Duty combines several sources of information into a single interface: radio scanner monitoring by trained volunteers and staff, publicly available fire incident maps, evacuation zone data, and weather conditions such as surface wind. The app remains free and ad-free for core features, though it also offers a paid tier with additional tools, which the organization has said is also used by first responders.
Nationwide Expansion
In 2025, Watch Duty announced a nationwide expansion beyond its original California and western-state coverage, citing wildfire risk affecting nearly one in three Americans and research linking wildfire smoke to more than 40,000 premature deaths annually in the U.S., according to reporting cited by the organization. The expansion has also included a partnership with Ring, announced after the Palisades Fire, to integrate Watch Duty’s alert data with Ring’s Neighbors platform under a feature called Fire Watch.
Five years after its founding as a volunteer-run response to a single wildfire, Watch Duty has become part of the broader wildfire information infrastructure across much of the United States, relying largely on the same model it started with: volunteers and staff monitoring emergency communications in real time, on behalf of communities they may never meet in person.
All Images Courtesy and Copyright of Watch Duty
