This Bay Area app going viral in Apple store to track LA wildfires

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - An app that was developed in Santa Rosa is seeing a big jump in popularity in response to the recent Southern California wildfires.

Watch Duty allows users to subscribe to emergency alerts for their neighborhood and county.

In just the last day or two, the app has seen over 750,000 new users, a large increase from the 3 million active users it had before. As of Thursday morning, it was the top free app on the Apple App Store.

"The user growth over the last 24 hours has been tremendous," said Nick Russell, Watch Duty's vice president of operations. "With the devastating fires occurring in such a populous area, everybody is really relying on us for information."

Watch Duty was first inspired by fires in the North Bay back in 2020. Its goal is to make evacuation warnings and other information about fires more accessible to people living in areas near the disaster.

The app uses active and retired firefighters, first responders, and dispatchers to monitor radio scanners and other sources of information.

"What that means is they use their local knowledge, and they tell us more about fires in their area," Russell said. "You know, 'this is a habitual location for new starts' or 'this is a really bad location for a new wildfire.'"

That expertise is then used to push updates to fire information pages on the app as they happen.

Watch Duty is run by a non-profit, and Russell says it does not have ads and the organization will not sell personal information.

"We're not here to profit off disaster," said Russell. "We live in the wildland, we're faced with these wildfires ourselves, and this is really is a labor of love for our entire team."

Russell says the team hopes to expand beyond fires to include alerts about floods and other disasters as well.

To download the app, click here.