During the early chaos of the Lee Fire in Western Garfield County this summer when social media was also a flame, locals wanted information.
Where's the smoke coming from?
How far away is it?
Do I have to evacuate?
Word began to spread about an app called Watch Duty.
Sailors and soldiers understand what it means to be on watch. It's a 24 7 thing split into manageable shifts so someone is awake and aware at all times while others are sleeping. The person on watch looks out for danger, keeps the boat on course.
The Watch Duty app works the same way. A crew of 20 staff and 280 volunteers across the globe gather information into a hub and make it visible on an interactive map. “It's a distillation of all sorts of different things that people would have to have open on their phone,” said Sehkar Padmanabhan, a watch duty staff reporter living in Los Angeles. “Like weather, like a flight tracker, air quality, any of those things. It's all in one place.”
That's also pretty much how the app got started four years ago by current CEO John Clarke Mills, said Katlyn Cummings, communications manager in Washington state. “He was a retired tech guy and he moved to the countryside and he experienced a wildfire evacuation,” she explained. ”He was hearing helicopters overhead and he was maybe getting one update a day from the agency.”
She added, “He was turning to Facebook and, back then, Twitter and there [were] a lot of conspiracy theories like space lasers and maybe entire towns burning down.”
So he took matters into his own hands.
“He set out with a team of engineers and people who'd been reporting on those social media sites and been doing a great job,” said Cummings. “They built Watch Duty in about 80, 90 days, and they started in three counties in California”.
Now the app covers 22 states and almost 1,500 counties in the U.S. The nonprofit logged 1.9 million users in 2023 and last year that number jumped to 7.2 million. Funding reached $5.6 million in 2024 from memberships, individual donations and grants, including 2 million from Google.
“As a fire starts, it's definitely a more local information level,” said Adam Johnson, a regional captain in Fort Collins, Colorado. He started as a volunteer in 2023 because he too was frustrated with how difficult it was to find wildfire information. “So for me, I was attempting to do what Watch Duty does in 2012, and I was contributing to a Facebook page called Colorado Wildfire Information” he explained. “And that was the year that the High Park Fire started in Larimer County [Colorado].”.
Johnson was also working for Colorado Parks and Wildlife at the time, which took him to the West Slope, maybe 200 miles away from the High Park Fire. He continued to post about it long distance. “I was subscribing to every fire department, Twitter, everything, and I was trying to populate it all into one Facebook page for people,” he continued.
His work eventually led him to Watch Duty. “And then, you know, come 2023, one of the Watch Duty reporters found me on Facebook and said, Hey, do you wanna come volunteer and do it here instead?” he said. “So that's how that happened.”
A typical day for Johnson means monitoring the web for wildfire information. “Like our situation now, [I wake up] and then we wait for official updates on the long-running fires like the Lee Fire,” he said.
“We make sure that we get the right signals. We make sure that no evacuation zones were missed,” added Padmanabhan. “And, you know, part of the day we're listening to radios, checking socials or we're processing information or watching press conferences or just any number of things.”
But not from the media. “Because we can't verify where that comes from,” said Johnson. “We only get it from agencies.”
During the Lee Fire, the Garfield County Sheriff urged the public on Facebook to rely on local updates instead of those from other organizations. Johnson told KDNK that it's a common practice for agencies unfamiliar with Watch Duty. “We have a person that can reach out to them and hopefully bridge the gap,” he said.
Today, the Lee Fire is 90% contained and more rain is on the way. But wildfire season across the West is far from over and Watch Duty is still on the job.
