John Clarke Mills was in a Zoom assembly when the whole lot went to hell. It was half previous 10 on the morning of January 7, 2025, and Mills—slim, profane, voice charred by years of smoking—was speaking up his free fire-tracking app, Watch Responsibility, to a coworker and certainly one of his nonprofit’s buyers. Behind him on the wall hung an enormous framed photograph of bushes engulfed in flames.
As CEO, Mills would usually pay shut consideration to a gathering with cash individuals, however his eyes stored flicking to the notifications within the background. Minutes earlier, a blaze had kicked off on the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades, California, 400 miles to the south. At 10:32 am, a digital camera within the College of California San Diego’s AlertCalifornia community caught a view of the billowing plume of smoke. Certainly one of Watch Responsibility’s distant staff noticed it on digital camera and snapped a picture. 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 reputation. The Palisades hearth.
The wind caught the embers; the fireplace unfold. Firefighters responded, shifting vehicles in to battle the blaze. CalFire—because the state’s Division of Forestry and Fireplace Safety is understood—posted its first public report of the incident at 11:06 am. Mills up to date everybody on the Zoom. This, he mentioned, can be dangerous.
Extra blazes ignited. To the east, the Eaton hearth barreled down on the neighborhood of Altadena. The Sundown hearth within the hills above Hollywood was small, a blip compared to the opposite two, however a drain on emergency sources nonetheless. For the subsequent week, Los Angeles grew to become a metropolis besieged by conflagration, confusion, and loss. Not less than 29 individuals useless. Billions of {dollars} of property destroyed. Whole neighborhoods—hundreds of properties—broken past restore or burned to the bottom.
Watch Responsibility posts particulars on lively fires in 22 states—their perimeter, evacuation zones, air high quality scores—and sends real-time notifications to its customers. Because the fires unfold, 2.5 million new individuals downloaded the app, roughly doubling its person base. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers talked about it on their late-night reveals. On social media, individuals instantly within the path of the flames sang Watch Responsibility’s praises, profoundly grateful for its existence.
Official evacuation orders are sometimes well timed and instructive, however not all the time. If you happen to dwell in hearth nation, you’ll have heard the tales about evacuation orders getting despatched to the incorrect individuals or being despatched too late—alerting individuals in homes which are already burning. To residents below menace of fireplace, Watch Responsibility is commonly the one clear sign that cuts via a wall of crosstalk and static.
