Postcards from the Rogue Valley

When a fire broke out a few miles from his Altadena, California, home the evening of January 7, 2025, Matt Blea and his family needed to make a crucial decision: Should they stay home, or evacuate?

A friend who did mountain rescue told Blea to download a free app called Watch Duty. On the app, he could see the fire’s perimeter, track evacuation orders and read updates about the emergency response. “It influenced me to leave the home sooner than later,” said Blea, who left with his wife and son that evening, before the Eaton Fire destroyed their home.

Blea was one of more than 2.5 million people who used Watch Duty to track fires burning across Los Angeles County that week. The information was collected, vetted and disseminated by about two dozen Watch Duty staff and over 100 volunteers who monitored emergency radio traffic, aircraft reports and local agency communications. 

The service proved vital, said David Hertz, a Malibu resident and captain of his community’s fire brigade, especially when some areas received little-to-no warning about the Eaton and Palisades fires that killed 31 people.

 “It’s like a democratization of data that empowers people.”

When every second matters

As wildfire seasons grow longer and more destructive, communities across the West are facing a new reality: the need for fast, accurate information can mean the difference between preparation and disaster. Yet in the middle of an emergency — when every second matters — finding reliable updates can be surprisingly difficult. 

For many people, the first instinct is to turn to their phones. They expect real-time alerts, social media updates, and instant access to information. But the systems used by firefighters, emergency managers, and first responders have often struggled to keep pace with the technology people rely on every day.

“The world now expects Twitters and TikToks and push notifications,” Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty, the wildfire tracking app launched in 2021, recently told NPR. “The world of technology has passed over this community of first responders and firefighters and emergency managers.”

Like Matt Blea, Mills saw that gap firsthand during California’s devastating 2020 wildfire season. Living off the grid in the forests of Sonoma County, he narrowly escaped the Wallbridge Fire and realized that another fire could someday threaten his own home. The overwhelming mix of information — emergency alerts, social media posts, agency updates, and scattered websites — left him wondering why there wasn’t a simpler way to understand what was happening in real time.

His answer was Watch Duty.

“Hey, I live in the woods, I’m gonna die, this has to get launched tomorrow,” Mills recalls thinking during the fire. “So we built Watch Duty in 80 days.”

Within a week of launching, the app had attracted 50,000 users. What began as a small service tracking fires in three Northern California counties by 2022 had grown into an essential resource covering the American West, Texas, and Oklahoma.

A new tool built on old technology

Watch Duty’s appeal comes from its ability to bring together information from many different sources: official emergency alerts, firefighting agencies, incident maps, weather data, and reports from people monitoring active fires on the ground.

But the app’s most unique feature relies on something far older than smartphones: radio.

Behind the scenes, a network of volunteers and staff reporters with backgrounds in firefighting, emergency dispatch, and journalism listen to firefighter radio communications, monitor wildfire cameras, and translate the constant stream of information into updates people can understand.

One of those contributors is Michael Silvester, a Watch Duty staff reporter who began as a volunteer. His fascination with emergency communications started as a child in New Zealand, where his father served as a volunteer firefighter.

“I used that as a way of keeping track of him on calls and stuff,” Silvester recounts in an interview with the Bay Area KQED.

Years later, he began listening to California firefighter radio channels from halfway around the world. What started as curiosity became a way to share critical information with people facing danger. Under the Twitter handle @CAFireScanner, Silvester gained a following after posting updates that helped people recognize when fires were approaching.

“Someone said I saved their life one day,” he recalls. “They didn’t know a fire was coming over the hill until they saw the message on Twitter.”

Watch Duty has allowed him to provide that same service in a more targeted way. Instead of following a constant stream of unrelated updates, users can select specific counties and receive information relevant to where they live.

“With Watch Duty, you can subscribe by county,” Silvester explains. “It’s targeted information — it’s delivered to you.”

Mills says that while the app relies on modern technology, its foundation remains the same tool firefighters have depended on for generations.

“We talk to you through an app; we talk to you through your phones,” he says. “But really, we listen to radios—a 100-year-old technology. That’s where you find out the most up-to-date, real-time intelligence, because it’s actually the firefighters doing the job in that moment.”

Monitoring dangerous floods

On June 8, 2026, Watch Duty began helping people track another deadly and destructive climate hazard: flooding.

The expansion comes as peak flash flood season begins in the U.S. and nearly one year after last July’s deadly Texas floods that killed more than 130 people, prompting outcry over why Texas Hill Country residents and visitors didn’t receive better communication about the impending danger. 

In its announcement, Watch Duty noted:

Existing flood alert systems are fragmented, slow, and hard to interpret in the moment — official warnings, precipitation data, and river gauges live in separate places, often in technical formats, and rarely on a clear map of the community at risk. Watch Duty’s flood product pulls those signals together on the same clear map that users already trust for wildfire, translating them into plain language and surfacing for early, community-level awareness before an event becomes an emergency.

During catastrophic flood events, Watch Duty’s trained network of reporters — many of them current or former first responders, dispatchers, and emergency management professionals — add live verification and context from on-the-ground emergency response teams for life-threatening situations. Reporting covers high-risk incidents for multiple types of flooding, as well as specific hazards like dam/levee failures and down bridges.”

Beginning today, anyone in the United States can open the Watch Duty app and see real-time flood data and mapping alongside the wildfire coverage that more than 16 million users relied on last year.” (Watch Duty, June 2026)

“This is painful that this keeps happening,” said Watch Duty’s Mills. “We’re not spreading enough information fast enough on as many channels as humanly possible.”

“We are seeing crazy rainfall in places that it’s not normal for them,” added Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, a longtime data scientist who worked under President Biden. “Maybe it’s never happened before, but it’s happening now, so you need to be aware.”

Redundancy is important

Emergency agencies remain understandably cautious about unofficial information sources, warning that inaccurate reports can create confusion during a crisis. California’s wildfire agency, Cal Fire, continues to encourage residents to rely on official emergency channels for verified information.

Nonetheless, for communities that have lived through catastrophic fires — or floods — access to information is not just convenient. It can be lifesaving.

Karen Hancock, Public Information Officer and Community Outreach Specialist for the Sonoma County Fire District, remembers the devastation of the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which swept through neighborhoods overnight, killing 22 people and destroying more than 5,000 structures. The disaster reinforced the importance of reaching residents quickly through multiple channels.

“We’ve learned that redundancy is really important,” Hancock told NPR.

For emergency managers already stretched thin during rapidly evolving disasters, having more ways to reach the public can make a critical difference.

As wildfires, especially, become more frequent and unpredictable, the challenge is no longer only fighting the flames. It means real-time verified alerts, live maps, and evacuation information. In the case of the Texas Hill Country Floods, the final warnings (three hours ahead of time) came as people were sleeping and there were no local sirens. 

The goal is straightforward: helping people understand where the danger is, what is happening, and when they need to act. For many communities, that means combining the newest technology with one of the oldest forms of emergency communication: people listening, watching, and sharing information when it matters most.

Close at hand

In a little over five years, Watch Duty has spread as fast as the fires — and now floods — it dutifully tracks.

The one-of-a-kind nonprofit has assembled a team with over 350 members, including roughly 60 paid staff members and 300 trained volunteers, many of whom are active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, emergency responders, and reporters, some with FEMA and National Wildfire Coordinating Group certifications. The group operates 24/7, with team members continuously vetting information from radio traffic, cameras, and satellites to push real-time alerts. 

Importantly, Watch Duty’s coverage is now nationwide.

Still, I was surprised a week ago when Watch Duty was the first to report a 2,000-acre brush fire that had broken out 36 miles north of Ashland. Its hourly reports filled the local newspaper, radio, and television stations with on-the-ground alerts, live photos, and detailed maps.

Yesterday, a week later, grey-orange smoke fills the sky where we live and the fire, only five percent contained, has breached 13,000 acres. Watch Duty continues to keep watch.

P.S. I just learned that a Southern Oregon University graduate, Race, who worked in the tasting room of the nearby winery we visit every week and hopes to become an entrepreneur, is on the frontline of the firefighters battling what’s known here as the East Evans Creek Fire.

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