Paulette Lifton woke up on her 67th birthday Tuesday morning in a panic to see a plume of smoke far from her home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first person he called was his sister Annette.
“What's happening?” Mrs. Lifton asked.
“You have to download the Watch Duty app,” his sister responded.
Ms. Lifton did just that, tracking the fire's spread through the map and app updates while filling her car with her most prized possessions: her favorite sequin jacket; her dogs, King Charles spaniels, Elle and Sansa; and the two Emmy Awards she won as a film and television sound editor.
For Ms. Lifton and thousands of other Los Angeles residents, Duty of vigilance It has become a lifeline in monitoring the multiple forest fires burning in the city. In a county of nearly 10 million people, news of the app has spread by word of mouth and in online community groups.
The app has at times provided faster and more reliable updates than the city's buggy mobile notification system.
On Thursday night, Los Angeles County's warning system broadcast an erroneous evacuation alert to all residents in its jurisdiction, rather than just those near the West Hills neighborhood, which was threatened by the Kenneth Fire. .
Officials said Saturday that some county residents were receiving outdated alerts after cell towers that had been taken offline during the fires came back online. Watch Duty, which has remained among the most downloaded free apps in Apple's App Store, has had no such problems.
Founded in 2021, the app has had 2 million downloads as of Tuesday and 14 million unique users this week, Watch Duty CEO John Mills said in an interview Saturday.
Mills operates the app through a nonprofit organization with a team of 200 volunteers and 15 full-time employees, including retired firefighters and dispatchers. That equipment listens to radio transmissions from emergency services and transmits live updates to the app, which maps fires and outlines 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 his phone was soon inundated with notifications. He woke up in the middle of the night to check it and has since posted several social media posts urging his neighbors to download it.
“It's morbid and I hate having to use it,” Marino said. “But it's necessary.”
Cara Mia DiMassa said she and her neighbors used the app's map to track the Eaton Fire, which saved her home but destroyed the Altadena summer camp she owned with her family.
He said it was “absolutely” a better tool for tracking fires than official government advisories, later adding that the app can be chaotic. Had to turn off notifications to sleep at night.
Mills, a businessman who lives in Sonoma County in Northern California, said he has had to evacuate due to fires three times in his life. He said he built Watch Duty because the government had never provided anything with the same utility.
The app collects very little personal data from users, he said, adding that he runs it through a nonprofit organization because he has no intention of selling it.
“This is my life and my community,” he said. “I owe it to my community not to be a disaster capitalist.”
Watch Duty is funded primarily by donations and has grown in recent years as wildfires on the West Coast have become more common and intense. The app currently provides coverage in 22 states west of the Mississippi River, not including Alaska and Louisiana.
Mills said he's not worried about whether the app's network can handle the 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 close to being done yet.”
