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WIRED: When Fires Rage, Millions Turn to Watch Duty. Meet the Guy Who Made It

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…

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Categories: Computers, Software