John Clarke Mills was in a Zoom meeting when everything went to hell. It was half past 10 on the morning of January 7, 2025, and Mills—slim, profane, voice charred by years of smoking—was talking up his free fire-tracking app, Watch Duty, to a coworker and one of his nonprofit’s investors. Behind him on the wall hung a giant framed photo of trees engulfed in flames.

As CEO, Mills would normally pay close attention to a meeting with money people, but his eyes kept flicking to the notifications in the background. Minutes earlier, a blaze had kicked off at the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades, California, 400 miles to the south. At 10:32 am, a camera in the University of California San Diego’s AlertCalifornia network caught a view of the billowing plume of smoke. One of Watch Duty’s remote workers saw it on camera and snapped an image. At 10:33 am, he posted it to the app with an anodyne caption: “Resources are responding to a reported vegetation fire with smoke visible on the Temescal Canyon camera.” Twenty minutes later, the incident had a name. The Palisades fire.

The wind caught the embers; the fire spread. Firefighters responded, moving trucks in to battle the blaze. CalFire—as the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is known—posted its first public report of the incident at 11:06 am. Mills updated everyone on the Zoom. This, he said, would be bad.

More blazes ignited. To the east, the Eaton fire barreled down on the neighborhood of Altadena. The Sunset fire in the hills above Hollywood was small, a blip in comparison to the other two, but a drain on emergency resources nonetheless. For the next week, Los Angeles became a city besieged by conflagration, confusion, and loss. At least 29 people dead. Billions of dollars of property destroyed. Entire neighborhoods—thousands of homes—damaged beyond repair or burned to the ground.

Watch Duty posts details on active fires in 22 states—their perimeter, evacuation zones, air quality ratings—and sends real-time notifications to its users. As the fires spread, 2.5 million new people downloaded the app, roughly doubling its user base. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers mentioned it on their late-night shows. On social media, people directly in the path of the flames sang Watch Duty’s praises, profoundly grateful for its existence.

Official evacuation orders are typically timely and instructive, but not always. If you live in fire country, you’ll have heard the stories about evacuation orders getting sent to the wrong people or being sent too late—alerting people in houses that are already burning. To residents under threat of fire, Watch Duty is often the one clear signal that cuts through a wall of crosstalk and static.

The Palisades Fire of January 2025.

Photograph: Jamie Lee Taete

Mills, who’s 42, saw it all happen from his desk in Sonoma County, California. “This is not the first time I’ve watched wind-driven fires tear through a community,” he tells me. He’s been much closer to fire than this. That’s what spurred him to build his app in the first place.

It’s Monday, January 20, and I’m squished next to Mills in his off-road utility vehicle as he barrels us straight up a steep canyon. He is wearing a tweed jacket and his favorite accessory: a forest green German alpine hat with a long turkey feather pinned to the brim. We’re rocketing across the hills of his sprawling, 170-acre woodland property in a Polaris Ranger—basically a souped-up electric golf cart. I’m holding on for dear life as we blast across rutted dirt trails, bounce over boulders, and splash through a creek dotted with moss-colored rocks.

We careen to a stop next to a large geodesic dome on the highest hilltop, surrounded by oaks, manzanita, and towering redwoods. In the distance I can spot several wineries, just past the edges of Mills’ property.

This verdant paradise is a world away from Mills’ hometown of Bronxville, New York, a few miles northeast of New York City. Growing up he was a boy scout who then got into coding, which led to some hacker shenanigans. In his early twenties, he moved to San Francisco and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He cofounded a restaurant management app called Zenput, which he later sold. He started to dream about leaving the city.

In fall 2019, he was scouting properties when he found this two-and-a-half-story hay bale wooden home on the outskirts of California wine country. He immediately bought the place and named the ranch Sherwood, after the ancient English woodlands made famous by the legends of Robin Hood.

Turns out, Mills is really into the Robin Hood thing. Sherwood Forestry Service is also the name of the 501c3 nonprofit that runs Watch Duty. Then there’s that green hat with the feather that he loves to wear, though he insists it is not a deliberate nod to the folk hero.

“Everyone loves Robin Hood,” Mills says. “A productive misfit. He’s not a superhero. He’s just a man. That’s why I like him so much.”

Mills took Sherwood off-grid, complementing solar panels and diesel backup generators with Starlink Wi-Fi. He built small cabins and round yurts, and invited guests to stay in them for free. Workers are building a big barn where he hopes to host events. Parked in the driveway is a retrofitted school bus that Mills takes to Burning Man (he’s been 16 times); he personally reworked the interior to resemble a Victorian living room.

Mills has long had a vision for this peaceful social paradise. But he almost lost it—before he’d really had a chance to finalize his plans.

Barely a month after he moved into Sherwood, a fire broke out on the ranch one hill over. It was a small fire, but Mills could see the flames roaring up into the sky in a rolling, black column. A helicopter flew in and tried to signal for Mills to evacuate. An air tanker sprayed hundreds of gallons of bright red ammonium phosphates and sulfates. The fire-retardant cocktail splattered across his neighbor’s barn, drenching the roof in red, and helped get the blaze under control. Mills was aghast.

“First, I’m just angry,” he says. “Because I live here and I’m living through fire, and there’s a helicopter over my house, telling me to leave, and I’m like, oh, that’s how I find out?” Then it dawned on him: There was no alternative. “I’m like, oh shit, this is just the best they got.”

Then, in September 2020, another fire struck. The Walbridge fire devoured 55,000 acres and 449 homes and structures and forced Mills to evacuate. He crashed with friends and spent a week frantically awaiting concrete information about where the fire was headed. Updates released by officials came out at an agonizingly slow pace.

After these fires, Mills went on the information warpath. He joined the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise program and his local Fire Safe group. He rode along with local firefighters and arranged meetings with Sonoma County’s head of transportation. He joined Pano AI, a startup focused on making wildfire detection cameras. (He is no longer involved with the company but kept his stake in it.) He got to know his neighbors so they could communicate during a crisis and lend each other a hand.

The most helpful resource he found was in local Facebook groups—posts from people living out in the woods who shared and corroborated what they had gleaned from listening to emergency scanners. “I found solace in these human beings, because the government wasn’t doing it,” Mills says.

That gave him an idea. Perhaps there was a way to amplify what the people on Facebook were doing—to give these vigilant stewards a megaphone.

Scanner enthusiasts have been around since the dawn of radio. Anyone can buy a device that picks up the signals emergency responders use to communicate. Or they can open a web browser and find a radio stream on websites like Broadcastify or apps like PulsePoint. Fewer have the patience to figure out the language of that world: the codes and lingo and shorthand that first responders use in their chatter. Those are the ones who become scanner devotees, either for the thrill of it or because they live in places that burn.

Mills knew that to make his idea work, he needed the scanner heads on board. He reached out to the people he had found on Facebook during his fire. At least one of them turned him down. In explaining why, they told Mills that he in part seemed like a typical Silicon Valley tech bro with a shiny new app idea. He didn’t come across as someone who truly understood life in fire country.

“It took some time to convince everyone,” Mills says. “I’m a weirdo and a misfit just like them. I didn’t come up through some Stanford graduate program. I was a stoner and a skater and a hacker. I understand the fringes of the world.”

Finally, he convinced Cole Euken, a fire photographer in Northern California, to join the platform. He would also eventually reach out to others who already had large social media followings, including Michael Silvester, a scanner enthusiast in New Zealand who was well known on Twitter as @CAFireScanner.

With just a few reporters on board, Mills set out to build the app. He partnered with David Merritt, a friend from the Zenput days who is now Watch Duty’s CTO. Mills says he wrote most of the code for Watch Duty himself in an 80-day frenzy. Then he submitted Watch Duty to the Apple and Google app stores. The app officially launched in August 2021.

A week later, Mills was eating dinner in a local restaurant. His phone emitted a trill: It was a Watch Duty notification. A fire had been spotted nearby. Across the restaurant, a chorus of pings rang out from other diners’ phones.

“I was like, holy crap,” Mills says. “What did we do?”

Once Watch Duty was out in the world, people in the broader scanner community began to notice that it delivered on its promise. “It was just a matter of show and tell,” Mills says. “Like, ‘OK cool John, I believe you. Maybe you’re not a dickhead.’”

As word of Watch Duty spread, more volunteers joined Mills’ team. The service quickly expanded beyond Sonoma County. When someone from another city or state joined the group, the app would start covering that place, too.

Maureen Bonessa, aka MoBones, joined Watch Duty as a volunteer in 2021. She runs a Facebook group called Norcal FireWeather, where she posts photos from the state’s northern reaches—the most wildfire-prone region. “We were all in our own separate places on the internet, reporting on fires, and now we’re all in the same place,” Bonessa says of Watch Duty. “Facebook’s become a mess, and it’s frustrating. But this is so clean, it’s pure information. It’s not bloated with garbage and ads and all that.”

Jessi Clark-White is a Watch Duty volunteer who lives in Oregon. “A lot of us got into this because we were personally threatened by fires,” she says. “We’re directly relating this to our families and people in our communities.”

Mills found these people, scattered across Facebook groups and Twitter threads, and saw a way to bring them together. Once he did, he tried to stay out of their way. “I’m just the architect of these merry men,” Mills told me, but clarified he doesn’t mean to use that term in a gendered way. By the middle of 2022, Watch Duty had expanded to every county in California. It felt like a huge reach at the time, but the app kept growing. In 2023, Watch Duty secured enough funding to start paying three of its reporters and expand to a few other states. In 2024, Watch Duty covered massive fires in Texas and launched the app in Hawaii. The app grew to cover 22 states, have 15 paid staff members, and release a paid tier that offered additional, noncritical features like custom map tools and fire-fighting plane tracking for up to $99 per year.

On Slack, the volunteers set up discrete channels for individual fires and divvied up the responsibility of covering them. They monitored agency websites, wildfire cameras, and scanner radio services like Broadcastify, which lets users listen to scanner radio streams from across the world online. The Watch Duty reporters translated that info into updates on the app.

The app also expanded its technical team. Gabe Schine, a volunteer firefighter and a software engineer, left a 15-year career at Google to join Watch Duty. He says working on the app felt like a moral imperative. “I would have been really disappointed in myself had I stayed at Google because the pay was better.” Schine says. “If I can pull this off, I just need to be a part of this. It’s too important. It’s too good.”

Mills wanted Watch Duty to start translating even more data into alerts—and for that, he needed access. He struck up partnerships with the AlertWest and Alert California wildfire camera networks. By 2023, Watch Duty started deploying portable antenna units in the woods that it calls Echo Radios. The radios listen for “tone-outs,” the unique sequence of beeps included in a transmission that scanner operators use to indicate the person or station the message was meant for. It basically works like a phone number for emergency comms—a phone number Watch Duty figured out how to trace and then use to determine which units were being sent to which incident. It’s not illegal, but people outside the fire service don’t typically decode these tones, and it can make some fire officials nervous.

Mills’ dining room is decorated with a painting of the local plants and animals made by an artist who did a residency at Sherwood.

Photograph: Skye Battles

Watch Duty has also borrowed information from another company. It was only last summer that Mills and his colleagues added evacuation zones as a layer to Watch Duty’s maps. The data is in part pulled from Genasys Protect, an evacuation alert software system that posts information from local officials. Watch Duty never asked permission from Genasys to use its data. (Though Watch Duty’s maps credit Genasys Protect.)

These Robin Hood hacker machinations have drawn the ire of fire officials and rivals in the for-profit industry alike. But Mills just wants to “poke the fuckin’ bear.”

“You don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Mills says about using that data. In his view, he’s trying to “do the right thing at all costs, no matter what.” Or, as he wrote in Watch Duty’s 2023 year-end report, “We will not let up until there is a single source of truth for all wildfire information.”

It didn’t take long for that goal to come to fruition.

The Palisades Fire revealed its devastating potential almost immediately, even with just a glance at the live cameras. Most pyrocumulus smoke clouds billow straight up into the sky, sometimes forming great, ominous mushroom clouds that can grow so big they create their own weather. This was different. The smoke from this fire, caught by the roaring Santa Ana winds, churned sideways, a lateral shifting cloud that swept along close to the ground. That’s when it became clear how fast things were moving.

Destruction from the Palisades fire.

Photograph: Jamie Lee Taete

When the fires multiplied and spread, people ran and homes burned. Cars and wheelchairs were left abandoned in the street as evacuees fled on foot. In the chaos, finding critical information about where the fire was and where it might go next became cluttered. Emergency systems fell behind. Evacuation warnings went out to the wrong places, came too late or not at all. “I think it’s fair to say that there certainly were a lot of real bonehead errors that were made,” says Rob McCarthy, an Altadena resident who evacuated to escape the Eaton fire. “It was a clusterfuck.”

Watch Duty, McCarthy says, was the only helpful resource he could find while he waited to see if his house would burn. “I’m so grateful for that app because it’s so easy to use,” McCarthy says. “I just got a lot more clarity about what was going on.”

Before the fire even started, Watch Duty was already on full alert. Mills says it was “all hands on deck.” As the flames spread, engineers fiddled with the servers behind the scenes to ensure the app could handle all the new users. “There were 48 hours where we were very busy on the engineering team,” Schine says.

Community support in Los Angeles, January 2025.

Photograph: Jamie Lee Taete

Some reporters, spread all across the world, worked 18-plus hour days. Cole Euken, Watch Duty’s first official reporter, posted the first update on the Palisades fire, then continued to upload information about the blaze for nearly 24 hours straight. Sekhar Padmanabhan, a paid employee who also covers fires on X as @barkflight, lives in LA, near the edge of the evacuation zone mandated for the Sunset fire on January 9. While many of his neighbors evacuated, he stayed put with his two cats, his scanner rolling.

The fire crept toward him, and he continued to post updates to Watch Duty. His home survived, but he acknowledges that he should have left. I ask Padmanabhan why he took the risk and stayed after spending years advising other people to evacuate. He doesn’t even hesitate to answer. “We’re all people who know what it’s like when you don’t have information,” Padmanabhan says. “Other people depend on it, so it would be my desire to help them out and not have them be in the dark.”

Relying on volunteers to provide life-saving information might seem risky. Think back to the days when Reddit users led a manhunt for the wrong person after the Boston Marathon bombing, or when the Citizen app issued a bounty during the 2021 wildfires in Southern California enticing users to locate a homeless man it had accused of setting a fire. Watch Duty has fielded concerns that it’s making similar scenarios possible.

“Watch Duty prides themselves on being expedient, but we have the obligation to be accurate,” says Nick Schuler, CalFire’s deputy director of communications and emergency incident awareness. He says that in Watch Duty’s effort to be fast, the team runs the risk of getting something wrong. “It’s not as simple as one app is the answer to everything,” Schuler says. “We have a lot more complex ways that we’re addressing people.”

Schuler notes that CalFire has made great efforts to get accurate information out to the public during a fire. The agency released more than 300 public updates over the course of the Palisades fire. The CalFire website has a 3D map that shows fire perimeters and evacuation zones, similar to what Watch Duty offers. But while these features are all available on CalFire’s website, the interface is challenging to navigate. Schuler agrees that Watch Duty is a well-put-together resource, but he cautions users against relying on a single source of fire updates.

Brian Fennessy, the fire chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, is one safety official more supportive of Watch Duty’s efforts. “I don’t really know any firefighters who don’t have Watch Duty on their phones,” Fennessy says. “I mean, it literally has become the app, period.”

Fennessy’s department supported efforts to fight the LA fires in January. He also has a personal connection. Fennesy grew up in Altadena, one of the neighborhoods annihilated by the Eaton fire. His childhood home burned. So did nearly all of the schools he had gone to as a kid.

Technology that firefighters use on the ground “has to be simple,” he says. “You really need to be able to just push the thing and there it is. Anything more complicated than that, firefighters won’t use it.”

Marty Walters, a volunteer who started monitoring wildfire scanners for Watch Duty in California’s Plumas and other surrounding rural counties in 2023, is proud of the work everyone on the team did during the LA fires. But she does wonder about how a service that is mostly operated by volunteers can scale. “You can expect certain things from volunteers, but you need to define what that is and then also support people so they don’t feel like they’re just left hanging in the wind,” Walters says. “That’s part of that whole weird Silicon Valley pirate mentality, which is, ‘Oh well, we’ll figure it out.’”

Lately Mills has been on something of a press tour. He and Watch Duty were roundly praised during and after the fires. Kelly Clarkson invited him onto her show. He even received an Unsung Heroes award from actor Steve Guttenberg. And he’s thinking about the future—expanding the app to cover floods and hurricanes, building in features that help people recover and rebuild, eventually becoming a one-stop shop for information during any disaster.

When he goes on TV to talk about his work, Mills is reserved. He removes his hat. He talks about the fires and what Watch Duty has done with a solemnity that almost—almost—belies that I-fucking-told-you-so look on his face.

Standing in his kitchen, Mills whips out his phone, adjusts his brown-tinted glasses, and pulls up a picture. It’s of the Los Angeles Emergency Operations Center, the city’s response coordination hub during the Palisades and Eaton fires. There’s a bank of screens on the wall, and Watch Duty is splayed across the largest screen, like the map of a battlefield in a war room.

“What do you notice?” Mills asks.

It’s a question he has also asked the Hilton Foundation, a philanthropy group who later agreed to invest $100,000 into Watch Duty. Right now, he’s just testing me.

I acknowledge the picture shows Watch Duty on the screen. He’s not satisfied. He wants me to think, he says. What does this mean? I shrug.

“The system has failed us,” Mills says, jabbing his finger at the screen. “This is a shining example of the utter, abject failure of government.” If official emergency services are relying on his free app during a disaster, he argues, rather than their own tax-payer funded systems, then something has gone terribly wrong.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars of just absolute fucking waste,” Mills says. He leans back, folding his arms. “And I’m like, yeah dude, this is much worse than you think. You should all fear for your lives.”

Later, Mills goes to his office and clicks into Zoom for a Watch Duty all-hands meeting. He doesn’t talk much, just fidgets with a small stack of challenge coins, tokens that are part of a long-running culture where first responders trade coins to show mutual respect. Onscreen, another employee encourages the staff to take care of themselves after the LA fire. Take time off if they need a mental health break.

But the Watch Duty reporters visible on the Zoom call and having spirited conversations in the chat seem anything but burned out. They know what they have done for LA—how much fear and anxiety they’ve been able to alleviate. And they know how much more work lies ahead of them.

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