John Clarke Mills was in a Zoom assembly when the whole lot went to hell. It was half previous 10 on the morning of January 7, 2025, and Mills—slim, profane, voice charred by years of smoking—was speaking up his free fire-tracking app, Watch Duty, to a coworker and one in every of his nonprofit’s traders. Behind him on the wall hung an enormous framed picture of timber engulfed in flames.
As CEO, Mills would usually pay shut consideration to a gathering with cash folks, however his eyes saved flicking to the notifications within the background. Minutes earlier, a blaze had kicked off on the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades, California, 400 miles to the south. At 10:32 am, a digicam within the College of California San Diego’s AlertCalifornia community caught a view of the billowing plume of smoke. One among Watch Responsibility’s distant employees noticed it on digicam and snapped a picture. At 10:33 am, he posted it to the app with an anodyne caption: “Sources are responding to a reported vegetation fireplace with smoke seen on the Temescal Canyon digicam.” Twenty minutes later, the incident had a reputation. The Palisades fireplace.
The wind caught the embers; the fireplace unfold. Firefighters responded, transferring vans in to battle the blaze. CalFire—because the state’s Division of Forestry and Fireplace Safety is understood—posted its first public report of the incident at 11:06 am. Mills up to date everybody on the Zoom. This, he mentioned, can be unhealthy.
Extra blazes ignited. To the east, the Eaton fire barreled down on the neighborhood of Altadena. The Sundown fireplace within the hills above Hollywood was small, a blip compared to the opposite two, however a drain on emergency sources nonetheless. For the following week, Los Angeles turned a metropolis besieged by conflagration, confusion, and loss. No less than 29 folks lifeless. Billions of {dollars} of property destroyed. Whole neighborhoods—hundreds of houses—broken past restore or burned to the bottom.
Watch Responsibility posts particulars on energetic fires in 22 states—their perimeter, evacuation zones, air high quality scores—and sends real-time notifications to its customers. Because the fires unfold, 2.5 million new folks downloaded the app, roughly doubling its consumer base. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers talked about it on their late-night exhibits. On social media, folks straight within the path of the flames sang Watch Responsibility’s praises, profoundly grateful for its existence.
Official evacuation orders are usually well timed and instructive, however not at all times. For those who reside in fireplace nation, you’ll have heard the tales about evacuation orders getting despatched to the wrong people or being despatched too late—alerting folks in homes which might be already burning. To residents underneath risk of fireplace, Watch Responsibility is commonly the one clear sign that cuts via a wall of crosstalk and static.
