
This App Could Save Your Life in an Emergency
Watch Duty, based in Sonoma, has become an essential tool during the L.A. wildfires.

Those living in Los Angeles are no stranger to Watch Duty, an app run by a non-profit that has become the de facto source for up-to-date fire and evacuation information during the devastating wildfires ravaging the city. The app’s staff is a community made up of 200 paid and volunteer workers who populate the maps with up-to-date information by listening to first responders on the radio channels in real time, then corroborating the information with the team before posting it online. The Sonoma-based company’s round-the-clock, real-time information has been vital during the ongoing disaster, where every second matters.
Much of the staff is made up of radio operators, firefighters, reporters, and engineers who work together to get the information to users, and fast. It not only maps out fires and firefighting efforts, but also shares the statuses of evacuation centers and key relief areas like those hosted by World Central Kitchen. Not surprisingly, Watch Duty has doubled its downloads since the start of the Los Angeles wildfires.
In a recent interview with Sunset affiliate Cheddar, co-founder and CEO John Clarke Mills, who now lives off the grid in Sonoma County, says that the app was inspired by his experience with the Kincaid and Woodbridge Fires, the latter of which impacted his hometown in Colorado. His choice to live in the fire-adjacent Sonoma forest means that he, like many Californians, was denied fire insurance coverage.
“Before they dropped me, they told me I can spend $100,000 a year, and they would insure me. And I told them to pound sand,” Mills said. “I’d rather spend that money on preparing for disaster and getting ready for fire to come here again, letting it burn through in a healthy way and not have a canopy or crown fire, as they call it.”
Mills has opted to DIY his own protection where the systems in place have fallen off. It comes as no surprise that he’s an out-of-the-box thinker, being a frequent participant at Burning Man, and in his free time has restored a historic Victorian in San Francisco and fashioned a 1980s school bus into a quirky version of the Orient Express aptly named the Disorient Express.
“I’ve gotten government grants to thin my forests around my house. I do prescribed fires. I have no eaves that are closed,” he continued. “I even built a rooftop sprinkler system that I can control remotely. I have redundant internet, I’m off the grid, I make my own power. And even as someone who knows this world I can’t get insured.”

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His perspective may have sounded fringe a few years ago, but this is the new reality facing the fire and disaster-prone Western U.S.
“As we’ve noticed over the past 10 years or so, fire season is getting longer and longer. We’ve had fires in January before. I think the Woolsey fire was also like that. We had the Marshall Fire in December in Colorado,” says Mills. “It’s happening more and more and things are becoming more unpredictable. I do not pretend to be a meteorologist. I’m just here to help with the fallout, unfortunately.”
Mills is no stranger to these types of tech-driven solutions; before Watch Duty, he was the co-founder and board member at Zenput, an operations platform servicing food industry and retail chains like Chipotle, Domino’s, 7-Eleven, and Five Guys. Soon he hopes to expand the app’s coverage to other natural disasters as well.
“I like to remind people that Watch Duty is not called fire duty or fire watch. It’s actually about natural disaster,” he says. “Very soon we’ll be focusing on other disasters, mainly water floods and things of that nature. We’re not stopping at fire.”
Watch Duty is supported by donations and memberships to their premium paid subscription, which offers air tanker tracking, saved map locations, and unlimited county monitoring. You can donate to their non-profit here.