On Tuesday morning, Paulette Lifton celebrated her 67th birthday when she woke up in a panic to see smoke billowing in the distance from her home in Los Angeles' Granada Hills neighborhood. The first person she called was her sister Annette.
“What's wrong?” asked Mr. Lifton.
“You need to download the Watch Duty app,” my sister replied.
Lifton did just that, tracking the fire's spread through the app's maps and updates while packing her most prized possession – her favorite sequined jacket – into her car. her dogs, King Charles Spaniels, Elle and Sansa; She won two Emmy Awards as a sound editor for television and film.
For Lifton and thousands of other Los Angeles residents, the shift has become a lifeline as they track multiple wildfires burning across the city. In the county of about 10 million people, news of the app spread through word of mouth and online community groups.
This app may provide faster and more reliable updates than the city's buggy mobile notification system.
On Thursday night, Los Angeles County's warning system broadcast a false evacuation alert to all residents in its jurisdiction, not just those near the West Hills area, which was under threat from the Kenneth Fire.
Officials announced Saturday that some county residents are receiving outdated alerts after cell towers that went offline during the fire came back online. Watch Duty, one of the most downloaded free apps on the Apple App Store, didn't have these issues.
Watch Duty CEO John Mills said in an interview Saturday that the app, which was founded in 2021, has had 2 million downloads since Tuesday and 14 million unique users this week.
Mills runs the app through a nonprofit organization with a team of 200 volunteers and 15 full-time employees, including retired firefighters and dispatchers. That team listens to radio broadcasts from emergency responders, maps the fire, and sends live updates to the app showing the boundaries of evacuation zones.
PJ Marino, a 52-year-old actor who lives in the city's Van Nuys neighborhood, downloaded Watch Duty on Tuesday night and immediately started receiving a flood of notifications on his phone. He found himself awake in the middle of the night to check it out and has since posted on social media multiple times, urging his neighbors to download it.
“It's sick and I hate having to use it,” Marino said. “But it's necessary.”
Carla Mia DiMassa said she and her neighbors tracked the Eaton Fire using the app's maps. Although his home was spared in the fire, his family's summer camp in Altadena was destroyed.
She said the app was “absolutely” a better tool for tracking fires than official notifications from the government, adding that the app could be confusing. She had to turn off notifications to sleep at night.
Mills, an entrepreneur who lives in Sonoma County in Northern California, said he has had to evacuate from fires three times in his life. He said he built Watch Duty because the government had never offered anything with the same utility.
He said the app collects little personal data from users, adding that it does not intend to sell it and is operating it through a nonprofit organization.
“This is my life and my community,” he said. “I have a responsibility to the community to not become a disaster capitalist.”
Watch Duty is primarily funded by donations and has expanded in recent years as wildfires have become more common and intense across the West Coast. The app currently covers 22 states west of the Mississippi River, excluding Alaska and Louisiana.
Mills said he's not worried about whether the app's network will be able to support an influx of users because it has enough volunteers and employees to staff the service 24 hours a day.
“When things go wrong, that's what we're here for,” Mills said. “And we're not done yet.”
