The Robin Hood of Wildfire Alerts: How One Misfit’s Free App Became LA’s Lifeline During the 2025 Palisades Fire

It was 10:30 a.m. on January 7, 2025, when catastrophe ignited across Southern California — and John Clarke Mills watched it unfold mid-Zoom call. Slender, sharp-tongued, his voice roughened by decades of smoking, Mills was pitching his free wildfire tracking app Watch Duty to a colleague and an investor in his nonprofit. Behind him, a large framed photograph of a forest engulfed in flames hung on his office wall.

As CEO, Mills would normally have given this investor meeting his full attention, but his gaze kept drifting to background notifications on his screen. Just minutes earlier, a small wildfire had sparked at the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades, California, 400 miles south of his Sonoma County base. At 10:32 a.m., a surveillance camera connected to UC San Diego’s AlertCalifornia network picked up the billowing smoke plume. A remote Watch Duty contributor spotted the cloud, captured a screenshot, and posted it to the app by 10:33 a.m. with a neutral, matter-of-fact caption: “Resources responding to reported vegetation fire, smoke visible on Temescal Canyon camera.” Twenty minutes later, the blaze got an official name: the Palisades Fire.

Strong winds carried embers across parched brush, and the fire exploded outward. Firefighters scrambled to position trucks to contain the blaze. CalFire, California’s state forestry and fire protection agency, released its first public update on the incident at 11:06 a.m. By that point, Mills already warned his Zoom audience: this was going to be bad.

More fires ignited rapidly across Southern California. To the east, the Eaton Fire bore down on the Altadena neighborhood. The Sunset Fire, burning in the hills above Hollywood, was smaller by comparison — a blip next to the other two blazes — but still drained already stretched emergency resources. Over the next week, Los Angeles became a city trapped by wildfire, chaos, and catastrophic loss. At least 29 people were killed, billions of dollars in property was destroyed, and entire neighborhoods, thousands of homes, were left damaged beyond repair or burned to ash.

Watch Duty aggregates real-time details on active fires across 22 U.S. states: perimeters, evacuation zones, air quality ratings, and pushes instant alerts to its users. As the 2025 LA fires spread, 2.5 million new users downloaded the app, nearly doubling its total user base. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers shouted it out on their late-night shows, and users directly in the fire’s path sang its praises on social media, deeply grateful for the clear, fast information it provided.

Official evacuation alerts are usually timely and useful, but they are not infallible. Anyone who lives in wildfire-prone California has heard the horror stories: alerts sent to the wrong zip codes, delayed warnings that arrive when homes are already burning. For residents in the line of fire, Watch Duty often cuts through the noise and conflicting information that plagues official emergency communications.

Mills, 42, watched the entire disaster unfold from his Sonoma County desk. “This isn’t the first time I’ve watched wind-fueled fires rip through a community,” he told me. He has had far closer brushes with wildfire than this — and that personal experience is what pushed him to build the app in the first place.

Two weeks after the fires broke out, on January 20, I rode squeezed next to Mills in his off-road utility vehicle as he drove it straight up a steep canyon trail. He wore a tweed jacket and his signature accessory: a forest green German alpine hat with a long turkey feather pinned to the brim. We raced across the rolling hills of his 170-acre woodland property in a Polaris Ranger, essentially a souped-up electric golf cart. I clung to the side for dear life as we bounded over rutted dirt trails, bounced over boulders, and splashed through a creek lined with mossy rocks.

We careened to a stop next to a large geodesic dome perched on the highest hilltop, surrounded by oak trees, manzanita, and towering redwoods. In the distance, just past the edge of Mills’ property, I could make out several wineries dotting the valley.

This lush, quiet retreat is a world away from Mills’ hometown of Bronxville, New York, a small suburb just northeast of New York City. Growing up, he was a Boy Scout who fell in love with coding, which led to his early days as a hacker. In his early 20s, he moved to San Francisco and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He co-founded Zenput, a restaurant management app, which he later sold, and began dreaming of leaving city life behind.

In fall 2019, while scouting rural properties, he found a two-and-a-half-story wooden hay-bale home on the edge of California’s wine country. He bought it immediately, naming the ranch Sherwood, after the legendary English forest tied to Robin Hood.

It turns out Mills has long been drawn to the Robin Hood mythology. Sherwood Forestry Service is also the name of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that runs Watch Duty. He brushes off suggestions that his signature green feathered hat is a deliberate nod to the folk hero, though.

“Everyone loves Robin Hood,” Mills says. “He’s a productive misfit. He’s not a superhero, he’s just a man. That’s why I like him so much.”

Mills turned Sherwood into an off-grid retreat, pairing solar panels and diesel backup generators with Starlink Wi-Fi. He built small cabins and round yurts, and invites guests to stay for free. Workers are currently finishing a large barn where he hopes to host community events. Parked in the driveway is a retrofitted school bus Mills takes to Burning Man (he’s attended 16 times); he gutted and redid the interior himself to look like a Victorian living room.

Mills had long imagined this peaceful, community-focused paradise, but he almost lost it before he could even finish settling in.

Just a month after he moved into Sherwood, a fire broke out on a hill adjacent to his ranch. It was a small blaze, but Mills could see flames roaring into the sky, sending thick black smoke rolling upward. A helicopter flew over his property, trying to signal he needed to evacuate. An air tanker dropped hundreds of gallons of bright red fire retardant, a mix of ammonium phosphates and sulfates, which splattered across his neighbor’s barn, drenching the roof in red, and helped get the fire under control. Mills was stunned.

“First, I was just angry,” he says. “I live here, I’m going through this, and the only way I find out I need to leave is a helicopter hovering over my house? That’s when it hit me: this is the best the system has to offer.”

Then, in September 2020, another fire hit. The Walbridge Fire burned 55,000 acres, destroyed 449 homes and structures, and forced Mills to evacuate. He stayed with friends, and spent a week frantically waiting for clear, updated information about where the fire was moving. Official updates trickled out at a painfully slow pace.

After those two fires, Mills set out to fix the broken wildfire information system. He joined the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise program and his local Fire Safe council. He rode along with local firefighters, arranged meetings with Sonoma County’s head of transportation, and joined Pano AI, a startup focused on wildfire detection cameras (he no longer works with the company but retains his stake). He connected with his neighbors to build a local communication network for crises.

The most useful resource he found was in local Facebook groups: posts from rural residents who shared and verified information they picked up listening to emergency scanner radios. “I found comfort from these people, because the government wasn’t providing this,” Mills says.

That gave him an idea: what if he could amplify what these community contributors were already doing, give these vigilant watchers a centralized platform to share their information?

Scanner enthusiasts have existed since the early days of radio. Anyone can buy a device that picks up emergency responder communication signals, or stream signals online through sites like Broadcastify or apps like PulsePoint. But it takes a special kind of patience to learn the coded language, jargon, and shorthand first responders use in their chatter. The people who put in that work become dedicated scanner hobbyists, either for the thrill or because they live in fire-prone areas.

Mills knew he needed the scanner community on board to make his idea work. He reached out to the people he’d connected with on Facebook during the 2020 Walbridge Fire. At least one turned him down, telling him he just seemed like another typical Silicon Valley tech bro with a shiny new startup idea, not someone who actually understood what it’s like to live in fire country.

“It took time to convince everyone,” Mills says. “I’m a weirdo and a misfit just like them. I didn’t come out of some Stanford graduate program. I was a stoner, a skater, a hacker. I get the fringes of the world.”

Eventually, he convinced Cole Euken, a Northern California fire photographer, to join the platform. He also connected with other established contributors with large social media followings, including Michael Silvester, a New Zealand-based scanner enthusiast well known on Twitter as @CAFireScanner.

With just a handful of volunteer contributors on board, Mills built the app. He partnered with David Merritt, a friend from his Zenput days who is now Watch Duty’s CTO. Mills wrote most of the app’s code himself in an 80-day coding sprint, then submitted it to the Apple and Google app stores. Watch Duty officially launched in August 2021.

A week after launch, Mills was eating dinner at a local restaurant when his phone buzzed with a Watch Duty alert: a fire had been spotted nearby. Across the dining room, a chorus of phone pings rang out from other diners’ devices.

“I was like, holy crap,” Mills says. “What did we just build?”

Once Watch Duty was public, the broader scanner community quickly saw it delivered on its promise. “It was just a matter of showing people what it could do,” Mills says. “Like, ‘OK cool John, I believe you. Maybe you’re not just another asshole after all.’”

As word of Watch Duty spread, more volunteers joined the team, and the service quickly expanded beyond Sonoma County. Any time a contributor from a new city or state joined, the app added coverage for that area.

Maureen Bonessa, known online as MoBones, joined Watch Duty as a volunteer in 2021. She runs a Facebook group called Norcal FireWeather, where she posts photos from Northern California, the state’s most wildfire-prone region. “We were all scattered across different corners of the internet reporting on fires before, but now we’re all in one place,” Bonessa says of Watch Duty. “Facebook has become a mess, it’s so frustrating. But this is so clean, it’s just pure information. No bloat, no garbage, no ads.”

Jessi Clark-White, a Watch Duty volunteer based in Oregon, says: “A lot of us got involved because we’ve personally been threatened by wildfire. This matters to our families and our neighbors.”

Mills found these scattered contributors across Facebook groups and Twitter threads, and built a space to bring them together — then stepped back to let them do their work. “I’m just the architect of these merry men,” Mills told me, clarifying that the phrase isn’t meant to be gendered. By mid-2022, Watch Duty had expanded to every county in California, a huge milestone at the time, but the app kept growing. In 2023, the organization secured enough funding to pay three full-time reporters and expand to a handful of other states. In 2024, Watch Duty covered massive wildfires in Texas and launched in Hawaii. Today, the app covers 22 states, has 15 paid staff members, and offers a premium tier with extra non-critical features like custom mapping tools and fire aircraft tracking for up to $99 a year.

On Slack, volunteers set up separate channels for individual active fires and divide up coverage responsibilities. They monitor agency websites, wildfire surveillance cameras, and scanner radio services like Broadcastify, then translate that jargon-heavy information into clear updates for the app.

The technical team also grew. Gabe Schine, a volunteer firefighter and software engineer, left a 15-year career at Google to join Watch Duty. He says working on the app felt like a moral obligation. “I would have been really disappointed in myself if I’d stayed at Google just for the higher pay,” Schine says. “If I can make this work, I have to be part of it. It’s too important, it’s too good.”

To expand the app’s alert capabilities, Mills needed access to more official data networks. He struck partnerships with the AlertWest and AlertCalifornia wildfire camera networks. By 2023, Watch Duty started deploying portable antenna units in remote wooded areas it calls Echo Radios. The radios pick up “tone-outs,” the unique sequence of beeps that signal which emergency unit or station a transmission is intended for — essentially a phone number for emergency communications. Watch Duty figured out how to trace these tones to figure out which units are being dispatched to which incidents. The practice isn’t illegal, but it’s not commonly done by people outside the fire service, and it has made some fire officials uneasy.

Watch Duty has also pulled evacuation zone data from another company without formal permission. Just last summer, the team added evacuation zone layers to Watch Duty’s maps, using data partially sourced from Genasys Protect, an evacuation alert software system that publishes official local information. Watch Duty does credit Genasys Protect on its maps, despite not asking for permission to use the data.

These Robin Hood-style hacker tactics have drawn criticism from fire officials and for-profit industry competitors alike. But Mills says he’s happy to ruffle feathers. “You don’t know what’s going to happen when you do this,” he says of using the data. In his view, he’s trying to “do the right thing at all costs, no matter what.” Or, as he wrote in Watch Duty’s 2023 year-end report: “We will not let up until there is a single source of truth for all wildfire information.”

It didn’t take long for that mission to be put to the ultimate test.

The Palisades Fire showed its devastating potential almost immediately, even to casual observers watching live camera feeds. Most pyrocumulus smoke clouds billow straight up into the sky, sometimes forming ominous mushroom clouds large enough to generate their own weather. This one was different. Pushed by fierce Santa Ana winds, the smoke churned sideways, hugging the ground as it swept across the landscape. That’s when it became clear how fast the fire was moving.

As fires multiplied and spread, people fled, homes burned, and vehicles were abandoned in the streets as evacuees ran for safety on foot. Amid the chaos, clear information about where the fire was and where it would go next was hard to find. Official emergency systems fell behind. Evacuation warnings went to the wrong neighborhoods, arrived too late, or never came at all. “I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of really stupid mistakes made,” says Rob McCarthy, an Altadena resident who evacuated to escape the Eaton Fire. “It was a total clusterfuck.”

Watch Duty, McCarthy says, was the only reliable resource he could find while he waited to find out if his home would burn. “I’m so grateful for that app because it’s so easy to use,” McCarthy says. “It gave me so much more clarity about what was going on.”

Mills says Watch Duty was already on full alert before the first fire even broke out: it was “all hands on deck” from the start. As the flames spread, engineers worked behind the scenes to tweak servers to handle the flood of new users. “There was a 48-hour stretch where the engineering team was completely swamped,” Schine says.

Volunteer and paid contributors spread across the globe worked 18+ hour days to keep up. Cole Euken, Watch Duty’s first official reporter, posted the first update on the Palisades Fire, then kept uploading new information for nearly 24 hours straight. Sekhar Padmanabhan, a paid Watch Duty employee who also covers fires on X as @barkflight, lives in LA near the edge of the evacuation zone for the January 9 Sunset Fire. While most of his neighbors evacuated, he stayed behind with his two cats, his scanner running nonstop.

As the fire crept toward his home, he kept posting updates to Watch Duty. His home survived, but he admits he should have evacuated. When I asked why he took the risk, after spending years advising other people to flee danger, he answered without hesitation: “We all know what it’s like to be stuck without information when a fire hits,” Padmanabhan says. “Other people depend on this, so I wanted to help them, not leave them in the dark.”

Relying on volunteers to provide life-saving information might seem risky, and critics have raised valid concerns. Think of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when Reddit users incorrectly identified a suspect, or the 2021 Southern California wildfires, when the Citizen app offered a bounty to users to find a homeless man falsely accused of starting a blaze. Watch Duty has faced questions about whether it could enable similar harmful errors.

“Watch Duty prides itself on speed, but we have an obligation to be accurate first,” says Nick Schuler, CalFire’s deputy director of communications and emergency incident awareness. He says that in the push to be fast, Watch Duty’s team runs the risk of getting details wrong. “It’s not as simple as one app being the answer to everything,” Schuler says. “We address public information needs through much more complex, coordinated systems.”

Schuler notes that CalFire has made major efforts to get accurate information out to the public during fires. The agency released more than 300 public updates over the course of the Palisades Fire, and its website hosts a 3D map showing fire perimeters and evacuation zones similar to what Watch Duty offers. But while those tools exist on CalFire’s site, the interface is notoriously difficult to navigate. Schuler agrees that Watch Duty is a well-built resource, but cautions users against relying on just one source for fire updates.

Brian Fennessy, fire chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, is one safety official who is far more supportive of Watch Duty’s work. “I don’t know any active firefighters who don’t have Watch Duty on their phones,” Fennessy says. “I mean, it’s literally become the go-to app, full stop.”

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