How we built Watch Duty, the lifesaving wildfire alert app | John Mills

0:07You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. After watching a series of wildfires rage around his home in Northern California in 2019, civic tech pioneer John Mills had a simple question. Where is the information that could help us better prepare for these disasters? In his talk, he shares the story behind WatchDuty, the real-time wildfire alert app he developed to provide residents and first responders with the life-saving heads-up they need to escape danger. His story proves that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can indeed change the world.

0:47I live in LA and during the Eaton and Palisades fires, I was among the hundreds of thousands who used this app to get critical information. So this work directly touched my life. I sat down with John shortly after TED Next to go beyond his talk and learn more about this sprint to create Watch Duty and what's on the horizon. Stick around after his talk for our conversation.

1:17Just one month after moving off the grid in Northern California, I was alerted by this sound. I went outside to investigate to find this helicopter circling. That's when I realized my neighbor's ranch had a wildfire running through it. The pilot started waving at me, probably to evacuate, but I stupidly grabbed my garden hose and started watering down my house instead. head. Shortly after that, a huge air attacker flew directly over my head. I watched the bomb bay doors open as the retardant went flying.

1:47And then the airspace cleared, and there was nothing left but silence. There was nothing on the news. There was no alert on my phone.

1:58And that's when it hit me. Like 25 ,000 pounds of retardant raining down on me. I was out here alone, on my own, with only two choices. As you probably guessed, I wasn't invited here today to tell you the story about how I quit. So like the Boy Scout that I was, I began preparing for the next inevitable wildfire. I started hardening my home, clearing my land, and building sprinkler systems. But just a few months later, a dry lightning storm passed over Northern California and lit the world on fire. I was forced to evacuate with little information, only this time I went down the internet rabbit hole and I found ham radio operators who were listening to first responder radio communications and putting that information out on Facebook and Twitter.

2:50This is how firefighters communicate, and it's the closest you can get to any real-time source of information. So these radio operators, many of whom are exoractive first responders, listen to radio sometimes 18 hours a day during wildfires and have become the heroes of their community because they're disseminating information before the officials. Now, they didn't ask for permission to do this, but they knew that their lives and their communities were at risk. While they offer an amazing service to the world, social media isn't the right platform for this. Not only are they hard to find, they work independently, and it doesn't send alerts to your phone.

3:32Social media is really made for cats and memes. Fortunately, my house was spared from that fire, and when I returned home, I joined those radio operators, began wildland fire training, going on ride-alongs, and immersed myself in wildfire. But I kept asking myself, where is the information?

3:55And that's when it hit me, and I couldn't unsee it. I realized that the government wasn't going to be able to solve this problem, but those radio operators were. If I could just band them all together, we could build our own emergency alerting system. So I recruited many of those radio operators, found volunteer engineers from Silicon Valley, we acquired donated servers, and embarked on an 80-day sprint to build the nonprofit emergency alerting app that we called Watch Duty.

4:30Just a few days later, after launch, a wind-driven fire blew through a mobile home park in Lake County, incinerating everything in its path. Our alerts beat the government by 41 minutes, giving thousands of residents critical moments to evacuate when every second counts. Unfortunately, the officials were not pleased. As it was their job to do this, Some of them threatened us. Some of them told us it was illegal. Spoiler alert, it isn't. The status quo has no interest in changing. But the residents, well, they were ecstatic. We were receiving love letters from across the region about how we'd save their homes, their livestock, their ranches, and their community.

5:14That's when we realized we were about to change the world if we just kept going. So with the wind at our backs, we recruited hundreds of radio operators, raised millions from philanthropists and locals, and expanded exponentially year after year across the American West. And despite the government's protests, even they started to use it.

5:41Firefighters, tanker pilots, and dozer operators all started utilizing it, and governors and mayors still tell the constituents to download it. We had broken through.

5:52And then LA lit on fire. All the alert systems crashed, and the world turned to us, including the emergency managers themselves. In just a few days, two and a half million people, one quarter of all of LA County, downloaded Watch Duty to find safety during their worst wildfire in history. This is just the beginning, because we are expanding to all natural disasters, because people are dying needlessly without any warning. We are building the alerting system that we need and frankly deserve. We are proof that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Mr. Rogers would tell you to look for the helpers, but I'm going to tell you that once you find them, prepare for battle because the status quo will not change without a fight.

6:38Do not ask for permission. Proceed until apprehended. Thank you.

6:46And now here's the conversation I had with John Mills after he gave his talk on the TED next stage. Coming up after the break.

7:00John, thanks for sitting down with me. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Congratulations on the talk. How are you feeling now that it's all behind you? Relieved and excited, I should say. Can you explain how watch duty works in a bit more detail? Just the mechanics of it? I'd be happy to do that. So it's really actually quite an analog process. You know, we have a mobile app that you can download on iOS and Android. It's also an app.watchduty.org. But that's just how you hear us, for lack of a better term, right? So what is happening behind the scenes are we have about 25 paid staff and 300 volunteers who are listening to fire service radio 24 hours a day.

7:42And so what happens is that we're scanning and scraping and mining the internet to find sources of, hey, there's a vegetation fire here. There's a California Highway Patrol dispatch for a vegetation fire. There's something on the news. There's something from a government website. And that triggers us to start listening. And then as we listen, we are collaborating in real time in Slack. So what will happen is that veg fire gets called out in L.A. County, for example. It looks up the LA County channel and says, this lat and long, there's a vegetation fire. We turn our radios on. We start listening and collaborating in real time.

8:17And as that event evolves, we start sending out notifications to you via the mobile application. And that's really it. Your talk focuses on the tension that exists between citizen-backed technology like yours and the needs that it addresses versus existing institutional inertia or government systems that can be very slow to update or slow to innovate. Why would you say, what is your explanation for why citizen tech is often outpacing government response systems? It's not about the tech. It's about the people, right? So we don't have these operating procedures that take us a long time to get an alert out, right?

8:59The Palisades fire, we had out two minutes after we saw it on the camera. We saw the veg fire tone out. Sorry, that's firefighter terms. The firefighters get toned out. It's like a page, essentially. And then we saw in the wildfire cameras a smoke column. And we knew immediately this was going to be catastrophic, and we start going. And so software isn't going to save us. I'm kind of like an anti-tech techie. There's tech that needs to exist to actually help humanity. And it's only a tool for us to talk to the world. As I mentioned in my TED Talk, when I experienced fires, I was on Facebook and Twitter listening to radio operators use whatever they could to broadcast to the world.

9:42So what I created – I mean people say it's a tech product, but I really look at it as a service. It's just a different form of media that is free and devoid of likes and clicks and nonsense, right? And so it's really about our operating procedures and how we can move so nimbly, and that's what the government, in my opinion, needs to unwind. They need to remove the red tape and use the products that they have in a better way because tech alone will not save them. I remember there was this period of time, maybe like a week, in which L.A. County was sending all these evacuation orders, but erroneously.

10:17Three of them, yes. Yes. Okay. So it was three erroneous evacuation alerts that went out just as much of L.A. County was still on fire. What is the kind of relationship between the alerts that we're getting on our phone from government sources and then the app that we can go to to see the progress of fires in various neighborhoods? There is no direct link other than we get those messages too. So when we saw that happen, we started to get 100 ,000 requests a second, which is twice Wikipedia. And we have four engineers who are staying up around the clock when L.A. was melting down. And so we saw the traffic spike and we're like, oh my God, what happened?

10:59And then, of course, our alerting tool picked that up and said, oh no, this looks like erroneous information that is completely useless. And it was a failure, unfortunately, on the government's part. I'm not going to get into why that happened. They're trying their best. They don't have the right software. There aren't necessarily the right type of techies who are trying to help this problem. And so this just keeps happening over and over and over again. For us, that doesn't happen because of how we architected and built our system for these types of high availability load problems that happen.

11:31And then there's humans in the loop who are constantly monitoring and maintaining how this operates. And so it's not really like a fire and forget situation. Yeah. So that leads to my follow-up question, which is how you are able to fact check yourselves. Since the sourcing isn't being checked by the official government bodies or agencies in the moment, is it sort of just built into the system because there are so many humans involved such that there can't be kind of just one erroneous software error or an alert that went out because of one misjudgment that then goes out to everyone? How do you keep a system of checks and balances within what is such an important source of information for people?

12:14Well, two things. One is there's a whole class of people called a public information officer. It's PIO for short. Every local jurisdiction has one or several. The sheriff will have one. The Office of Emergency Services will have one. And many of our staff have more PIO certifications than some of the PIOs who fight us. So that's something that it's important. We not only do their training, we have our own training on top of it. 15 of our staff are paid radio operators and dispatchers. So we are, frankly, extraordinarily certified to do this work. And then the final thing is we are real-time fact-checking, right?

12:52That's what happens. And so as the event is unfolding, we are checking each other's work as this goes on. So a great example of this is like some radio transmissions are scratchy or not ideal. And we'll be talking in Slack. We record everything as well. So if we ever have to go to court or back up what we've done, we record everything. Every inch of radio traffic, every screen capture, every recording is recorded and it has come in handy many times. So what is happening is that there are times that we can't hear something either. The incident commander will say 15 acres, but it sounded like five.

13:30And so we'll be like, we can't decipher that. We're going to sit on the information and not say anything, right? Which I know blows people's minds when you hear that. but we're sending so many updates, like the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire. I mean, we sent, I think a third of a billion notifications in like a week. It was nuts. And so we're not hasty. We're like, we'd rather wait five more minutes till the next radio transmission than just jump the gun. So fact checking is just part of our standard operating procedures. And it's really who we are at our core. We have an expression that, and it took us a long time.

14:05We're four years old now, but trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets, right? And so if we ruin that trust and everything we've built, everything goes downhill and we cannot erode trust. Yeah. You mentioned in your talk also that the government wasn't pleased with watch duty at first or in the first couple of years, but by the time the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out earlier in 2025, government officials were widely using the app and widely citing the app. What do you think helped people get over the hump? Well, I think trust is really the important part, right? We're outsiders to this world, even though many of us have been firefighters and first responders and dispatchers and whatever, we're not controlled by the government, right?

14:51So that I think causes struggles, obviously. And then look, like very clearly, like this is disruptive to their way of life, right? And so while I feel for those people, I feel for my wildland neighbors and community who have gone through multiple fires with almost no information. And I don't really have much tolerance for it. We need to do better as a people to survive as a community. And so, again, I feel for them, but they need to adapt and overcome. And I hope that they can change their bureaucratic processes to adapt and, frankly, put us out of business. I'm a nonprofit, right? I don't have to be here.

15:29Right. I'm here because I choose to be here. So we are here to be of service. And that's what's important to remember. And obviously, it feels especially as somebody who lives in Los Angeles and really lived and breathed a climate shock this year and was able to benefit from the service of watch duty. It seems like we all need as much help as we can get. So what is your hope for the partnership between nonprofits like yours and existing institutions? Yeah, I mean, look, it's happening more and more. We partner with a lot of organizations. Believe it or not, some governments are still not happy about us operating, but many of them are, and many of them give us direct information.

16:09We now have many other PIOs who are going on Facebook Live and putting that information out so that we can republish it for them. They are seeing us as another media channel to reach their audience. And so it's just going to take time. But let's talk about history for a second, because I, as a technologist, try and study the past to see the future. And so when social media first came out, which was whatever, 2008-ish, let's call it a little earlier, but it started to really catch on to the mainstream in 7, 8, 9. It wasn't until like I think 2012 or 13 that these PIOs actually started to adopt Facebook and Twitter.

16:50They resisted horribly. And it's interesting when I talk with PIOs who've been here a long time, they remember the resistance. They remember what was happening, but their civilians were getting upset and they were spreading misinformation to each other on social media. So they had to get involved in the narrative. That took, you know, five, six, seven years for that to happen. I'm only four years old, so I understand the resistance. I just don't think they see where we are in the timeline. As you're describing this app, it sounds like it's really enabling us citizens to get to the primary source, break down the barriers and the various layers of bureaucracy between what's happening wherever the burn zones are and then us needing to know the information, especially those of us who might need to be evacuated or be close to it.

17:38I mean, this is what we need for all sorts of problems, right? So whether it's a fast-moving wildfire or frankly, the air quality in LA was abysmal. And even after the fire was over, people would look at purple air or our sensors, which come from purple air, and they'd say, oh, the PM 2.5 is low. And my thought is like, man, you are inhaling like cadmium, benzene, and other heavy metals from cars on fire. Like this is not okay. We need more truth and more sources of truth that are verified by science, right? And facts. And Watch Duty is just publishing fact after fact after fact and be like, you can figure that out, right?

18:20You look at this information. We don't say evacuate now, go right out your driveway. You're gonna make it to safety. We say the wind's going this way, the fire moving's fast. You should make a decision based upon a bunch of facts. Right. And that's really where we shine. And I think that we used to live in a world where there was a lot of journalistic integrity and reporting around facts and less editorialization. So what we do reminds me of where we come from. Well, frankly, we came up in a time where there was a lot more local media, too. There were reporters on the ground that could actually give us information and show up in places in our communities.

18:55And now it's been so decimated so that what's left is a bunch of editorializing from the national level. So this is really important for our own backyards. You mentioned in your talk you wanted to move into other kinds of natural disaster reporting, such as hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes. How is that going? What's the update on that progress? It's coming. We are working right now avidly on our flood program, which will be in the same product, of course, because I didn't call it fire duty on purpose. It is about citizens on watch duty. And so it was always the goal, if we became successful or we caught the proverbial fire truck, as they say, that we would expand to cover all of these disasters.

19:39because regardless of it's lava, tornado, fire, flood, where do I go? Where are my pets? Where's my family? And how do I get to safety? And so it's really, we think about it as like a geospatial type of problem. Like, do I need to move? Yes or no is the number one question that I ask myself. And so we're really focused now on that program. We're shooting for spring of 2026 for that to be live. And then we're going to be expanding our coverage for fire to all 50 states in December. And how are the partnerships going? Are local governments more willing to collaborate these days? Absolutely. Yeah, we're doing a lot more work with a lot of municipalities, utilities, and others.

20:23And it's really starting to take off. It's a fascinating thing to see that story change. And everybody we help starts to understand what we're here to do. and then the neighboring counties find out as well. And what's really wild, you want to hear some crazy stories, what happens when towns start to burn down and they're ill-prepared for fire, there are very, very many times where we will get a call between the hours of 10 and 3 in the morning when their evacuation software is either crashing or they don't have evacuation zones. And we have geospatial engineers who will help them build their evac zones in the middle of the night at no cost and deploy it on watch duty immediately.

21:09So we're doing a lot of digital first response and no one ever sees it because you see a simple little app that looks easy to use. But what's really happening is utter chaos throughout the night when this happens. It seems like that could have been life-saving in the case of those flash floods in Hunt, Texas over the summer. The Caraville floods, yep. Yeah. Wow. It's a similar problem. And there's a lot of SOPs, as they call them, operating procedures that need to get updated because we heard them on the radio 90 minutes before trying to decide if they were going to push out an alert or not. And they decided not to for whatever reason.

21:47And that's coming out in the news now. So I'm not going to throw mud at this whole thing. It's not any one agency's fault. It's not the fire or the sheriff. It's everybody together. It's how we've all voted, what we've accepted as okay. And now we just say it's an act of God every time it happens. And I'm frankly tired of that. Yeah, it seems like there are lots of ways for this to be preventable. So John, thank you so much for your work. Last question before I let you go. What is a small gratitude that you have in your life right now? a little detail or anything that you're really grateful for.

22:20Man, I'm grateful for my small town and my community that supported me when I was building this. I love being out in the woods, right outside of town and spending time with human beings who are not all trying to solve the same problem where I come from in Silicon Valley. Now the conversation is like, what type of AI are you in? It's not very unique or interesting. And so my neighbors are cattle ranchers, winemakers, restaurateurs, and they're all over the place. And I love being around them and I love to support them and their lifestyle of doing this and frankly feeding California and feeding America.

22:58And so I'm just grateful for them and their support while I was building this thing and people thought I was crazy. And now I get to help the world survive these apocalyptic moments. And it's really an honor to do this and something I could never have seen coming. Yeah. Well, John Mills, thank you so much for your work. Thank you for your talk and for sitting down with me. Thank you. I appreciate it.

23:25That was John Mills speaking at TED Next 2025 and in conversation with me, Elise Hugh. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tanzika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Emma Tomner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

24:10Thank you.