The creator of the popular wildfire information app Watch Duty is urging lawmakers to make emergency alerts faster, more accessible and easier to understand.
John Mills, co-founder and CEO of Watch Duty, the nonprofit organization behind the app that’s used by millions of Americans to view evacuation and other wildfire information, testified before a U.S. House panel on Feb. 3 that alerts are often issued too late, hard to decipher and lack helpful context such as escape routes or broader incident information.
He said emergency alert systems are “crippled by a fragmented bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure.” He added that emergency managers are spread too thin and can't keep up with the speed of today’s climate-driven fires.
“As a result, official warnings usually only go out after a community is on fire, houses are burning, aircraft are buzzing overhead and people are already running for their lives,” Mills said.
Deadly California wildfires highlighted
Mills testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources alongside Paradise Mayor Steve Crowder in support of the Fix Our Forests Act, a bipartisan bill that passed the House in 2025. A companion bill is making its way through the Senate and would create a national Wildfire Intelligence Center, which Mills said could be integrated with the work Watch Duty is doing to improve emergency alerts.
He said emergency warning systems failed people trying to escape the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, where “confusion caused residents to flee from fairly safe areas directly into the path of the fire.”
The Camp Fire is California’s deadliest wildfire. It killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures. In 2020, the North Complex/ Bear Fire killed 16 more Butte County residents. The NSPR series Sounding the Alarm found emergency alerts weren’t getting to the people in the fire’s path.
Concerns over the effectiveness of emergency alerts has prompted local officials to expand their warning systems to include outdoor sirens throughout the town of Paradise and radio-based AlertFM receivers across the county.
Mills said emergency alerts also failed people trying to flee the 2025 Los Angeles firestorm, which ripped through Altadena and the Pacific Palisades and killed 31 people.
Still, people starved for updates turned to the Watch Duty app in large numbers during the LA fires, Mills said. More than 2.5 million people downloaded the app in a week, becoming the country’s most sought app at the time.
Ease of use cited for app’s popularity
NBC News reported Los Angeles residents flooded social media with screenshots of the app to get other people to download it and stay up to date with potentially life-saving information. The outlet reported the company believes the app’s accessibility is what makes it popular. While the Los Angeles Daily News reported that LA residents turned to the app because it served as a one-stop shop for information.
During his testimony, Mills said government agencies are increasingly turning to social media to deliver critical emergency information. That’s where alerts can get buried or commingled with misinformation about a disaster, he said.
“Some agencies warn the public not to rely on Watch Duty and similar platforms,” Mills said. “They prefer people to visit their websites. Well, guess what? So would we, but websites don't wake you up at night. Alerts do.”
KPBS reported Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, is one major agency that doesn’t enthusiastically send people to the Watch Duty platform.
Battalion Chief Brent Pascua, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, told KPBS in a statement that Watch Duty has “good intentions” but shouldn’t be considered an official source of information because it can “inadvertently” spread false information about disasters.
Still, the app, which was founded in 2021, has fans in the firefighting business. Among them is the Sonoma County Fire District. A spokesperson for the district told NPR in 2024 that Watch Duty has “filled a gap” and that the platform is “an amazing tool for not only our public but for our firefighters and crews as well.”
Mills urged lawmakers to get the government to work with Watch Duty’s platform instead of trying to prop-up new systems on its own.
“Make no mistake, this is not a tech success story,” Mills said of his organization. “This is a story of failure. As one of America's largest cities burned, both residents and first responders were unable to get the information they needed to survive. As a result, everyone turned to turn to us for information, including the emergency managers and the first responders themselves.”
