Watch Duty and PulsePoint today announced a new collaboration that connects PulsePoint vegetation fire incidents with corresponding Watch Duty incidents—combining the strengths of both platforms to provide a more complete picture for those affected by a wildfire. The partnership brings together two trusted nonprofit organizations that exist to inform and support communities when emergencies strike.
Watch Duty, powered by active and retired firefighters and first responders, provides wildfire alerts and situational updates. PulsePoint, in partnership with local public safety agencies, provides real-time notifications and resource information directly from the 911 system. By joining forces, the organizations are partnering to deepen the help and power of community members to access timely and actionable information when it matters most.
“PulsePoint has been a lifesaving tool in my community for years and was the inspiration to build Watch Duty,” said John Mills, CEO and Co-Founder of Watch Duty. “We value working with partners who share our belief that timely, accurate information helps save lives. This came really naturally for us. We’re simply doing what is right and making it easier for people and first responders to stay informed during potentially urgent events.”
“Through better integration between our platforms, PulsePoint and Watch Duty are working to make it easier to access timely and actionable information during a wildfire emergency,” said Richard Price, President and Founder of PulsePoint. “Wildfires are devastating our communities and collaboration and innovation in this space is more important than ever. We are committed to working together to improve the effectiveness and promise of both our products.”
This collaboration reflects a shared commitment to ensuring communities have access to the right information at the right time. With vegetation fires and other emergencies becoming more frequent, Watch Duty and PulsePoint will continue to explore partnerships that strengthen preparedness and public safety.
We are truly honored to be named one of TIME’s Most Influential Companies of 2025 for our work during California’s historic Palisades and Eaton Fires.
The outpouring of support and praise for our work is humbling—but make no mistake, awards are not why we do this.
We do this because we have to.
We do this for you, for us, our families, our neighbors, our communities, and our first responders who risk their lives for ours.
We do this because these fires that are ripping through our towns show no signs of letting up.
But neither are we.
All of this recognition we are receiving is not just overwhelming – it’s foreign to us. We don’t hold advanced degrees from prestigious schools. We didn’t chase fancy jobs to drive fancy cars. We’ve never had much interest in the status quo — and it’s no surprise that most of us didn’t grow up doing what we were told.
But what we do have is heart.
And grit.
And the unshakable belief that service comes before self.
We make deals on a handshake.
And our word is our bond.
We are radio operators, engineers, firefighters, dispatchers, geeks, ranchers, and farmers.
We are the most unlikely of folk to do something like this which makes it that much more special.
But we’re not alone.
With that, we’d like to dedicate this award to you — the people like us — the misfits, the hackers, the weirdos, the non-obvious, and the rebels. The ones who know that the status quo is broken and wake up every day to fight to change it.
We see you.
We are you.
We are proof that sometimes it's the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Introducing Watch Duty Teams, a powerful new way to manage your organization’s memberships with discounted pricing starting at just 25 users.
With Teams, you’ll receive all the same features as either basic or professional, but with powerful administrative tools including consolidated billing and invoicing, centralized user management, and support for single sign-on (SSO). With these enhancements, organizations of all sizes can now deploy Watch Duty at scale while maintaining the security, control, and accountability they require.
To purchase or upgrade your account, simply open the main menu (☰) in the app and click on “Membership” or reach out to us directly at sales@watchduty.org.
Our prescribed fire data is now publicly available outside of Watch Duty through Esri's ArcGIS Online, providing valuable information to the public, fire services, and the research community.
By making this data openly accessible, we hope to support efforts to normalize prescribed fire as a critical tool for land management and wildfire prevention. This initiative will also help reduce false alarms and unnecessary dispatches, allowing emergency services to focus on real threats.Additionally, researchers and scientists can now use this data for a wide range of applications, from improving air quality models to training AI for wildfire detection and enhancing fire behavior predictions.This is an important leap forward in improving wildfire awareness, response, and prevention. Explore the dataset and see how it can support a safer, more informed future: https://watchduty.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1784011a31104a45a584b26dbd23adfe
Original Source: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-01-28/watch-duty-fire-information-los-angeles-official-alerts
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.
