Last fall, a relatively unknown app called Watch Duty beat out Open AI, TikTok and Instagram to become the most downloaded iPhone app in the country. But Watch Duty wasn’t a venture-backed startup. It was an app I founded as a volunteer-funded nonprofit to track and share information about wildfires in real time after my own experience struggling to find helpful information when a nearby blaze threatened my home.
When the Bridge, Line and Airport fires simultaneously tore through Southern California in September 2024, around 420,000 people downloaded the app in one week, shooting us to the top of the charts. In one week in early January, when Los Angeles was beset by fire on all sides and communities like Pacific Palisades and Altadena were turning to ash, that number spiked to 2 million.
But Watch Duty’s success as a lifeline for Americans in peril isn’t something to celebrate. It’s actually a reflection of a disturbing failure: Our government does not properly alert people about disasters, with life-and-death consequences.
This failure starts with how frequently governments communicate disaster information. Traditionally, emergency managers who transmit alerts on behalf of state and local governments limit their communications. There are good reasons for this. Public officials want to communicate with urgency. Sending non-urgent information, it’s feared, will lead to fatigue, frustration and ignored warnings. They also don’t want people to panic prematurely and clog roads trying to evacuate unless it’s absolutely necessary.
But what this means is that emergency managers issue alerts only once a wildfire is established — either ripping through your community or on its way. By that time, you’ve likely smelled smoke, received texts from neighbors or heard firefighting aircraft overhead. Panic has already set in.
What we’ve discovered through years of studies and user interviews is that, in an emergency, information fatigue never occurs. In crises, more information is always better than less. Withholding information breeds confusion and misinformation, a lesson our nation painfully learned during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rather than send one alert — “It’s time to go!” — Watch Duty issues several, relying on verified reports from first responders on the ground to tell our users about the fire from its first spark to its last ember. That includes information about how quickly the fire is spreading, which way it’s heading, and whether it’s blazing past containment lines. People getting these alerts will know before an official warning goes out — sometimes as much as half an hour before — that they need to be packing their bags, safeguarding their pets and planning their escapes. Then, when people receive an official evacuation order on their phones or a knock on their door from emergency personnel, they’re ready to go. Having a heads-up sooner saves lives — of residents, of first responders, even of pets and livestock.
The quantity of official alerts isn’t the only problem. Quality matters too. Most alerts lack even basic considerations of a user’s experience. Often they’re written in all caps without proper grammar, punctuation or line breaks that would make them easier to read. Worse still, they don’t always include maps, so people are left to guess the exact location of the fire and the direction it’s heading. Confusing alerts — such as those that lack maps and clear spatial information — are dangerous. During the Camp fire in 2018 in Paradise, Calif., disoriented residents actually fled from relatively safe zones directly into the path of the fire.
Finally, context matters. Emergency managers increasingly post their alerts on social media. But almost immediately, those posts are flooded with comments and reposts that pollute, misrepresent and even attempt to discredit the alert, inadvertently fueling misinformation. Until tech platforms clean up this kind of behavior — something they seem less interested in doing these days — emergency alerts don’t belong on social media. Emergency managers should limit their communications to closed platforms like the Wireless Emergency Alerts system that sends messages directly to our phones. Government websites, legitimate news sites, TV and radio networks and third-party platforms like Watch Duty — the ones that care about providing accurate information and aren’t chasing clicks — are also crucial channels of communication.
California’s wildfire agency, Cal Fire, has warned citizens that Watch Duty and similar apps “should not be regarded as official sources of information.” That agency and some others don’t provide up-to-date data to Watch Duty to share with users. They’d prefer people visit their website.
Honestly, so would we. Our goal for Watch Duty isn’t hyperscale growth; it’s irrelevance. We want public emergency agencies to adopt these best practices, trust people with more information rather than less, and create compelling, effective real-time visual alerts so that Watch Duty doesn’t need to exist. Until that day, emergency managers everywhere should embrace the available platforms that provide critical information and save lives.
John Mills is the founder and chief executive of Watch Duty.
