Watch Duty Expands Real-Time Wildfire Alert Platform to Nationwide Coverage
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Watch Duty has announced its expansion from 22 states to nationwide coverage, ensuring that every community now has access to verified, real-time wildfire information when it matters most.
Founded just four years ago serving only a few California counties, Watch Duty has rapidly grown into one of the most trusted (and accessed) voices in public safety. The nonprofit organization is best known for its actionable wildfire alerts, but also provides air quality index, wind direction, and red-flag warnings delivered directly through the Watch Duty app.
While Watch Duty’s core services remain free, ad-free, and accessible to everyone, the organization also offers a suite of advanced tools that offer deeper intelligence. These include enhanced mapping, weather insights, aircraft tracking, utility overlays, satellite detection and other professional-grade features that are all trusted by frontline responders and delivered at a fraction of the cost of traditional commercial platforms.
“We’re transforming how disaster information is shared by putting people, not profit, at the center,” said John Clarke Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty. “This nationwide expansion ensures no one faces disaster in the dark, like I was in 2021 when I founded Watch Duty. By bringing first responders and technologists together, we’re solving long-standing problems in public safety and we’re doing it better, faster, and together.”
Wildfire is no longer a seasonal or local hazard. Nearly one in three Americans now lives in an area with significant wildfire risk, and drifting smoke from distant fires threatens millions more.
Despite modern detection and suppression tools, life-saving data often reaches the public too slowly or inconsistently to act on. Critical signals exist in fragmented systems that were never designed for public communication.
Watch Duty closes that gap. Its platform takes in, verifies, and translates this information in real time into plain-language, map-based updates people can act on immediately. During the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles County, Watch Duty became the only lifeline, used by more than eight million people in a single week and displayed in the city’s Emergency Operations Center as a primary live intelligence feed.
Information for this story was sourced from Watch Duty.
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