Watch Duty is adding flood alerts to its wildfire app, turning a service built for fast-moving blazes into one that can also warn users about rising water. The new feature is rolling out as a free update and gives people near flood zones push notifications with more details if they allow the app to track their location.
That matters now because Watch Duty is expanding beyond the crisis it was born to track. The app began in 2021 with a focus on California’s wildfires, then spread to the entire US, and it became a critical resource during the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles last year. Now the company is trying to fold flood alerts into the same system people already use when the danger is fire.
John Mills said Watch Duty wanted to start working on flood alerts in January of 2025, and the company is presenting the new coverage in a simpler way than its wildfire pages. Instead of parsing the chaos of a fire map, the flood view is centered on where the floodplain is and what the water levels are at. Users can also find the nearest buoy and set a push alert for the moment it rises high enough that flooding could become a threat.
Mills said floods are, in some ways, easier to track than wildfires because there is more warning. But he also pointed to the reason the feature still takes work: the challenge is taking information from a lot of agencies and turning it into one local picture that people can actually use. “With Watch Duty, you can start to piece together a bunch of information all on one screen to make an informed decision,” he said.
That is where the new flood feature lands, between a simpler hazard and a messier information stream. Watch Duty has reported some floods before, but only as one-off events, and it already relies on paid employee reporters and volunteers who monitor emergency responder radio channels and translate what they hear for app users. It also has partnerships, including with Amazon’s Ring cameras, that let people share video in the app if a fire is nearby.
The unanswered question is how far the flood coverage will go compared with wildfire alerts, and how quickly it will be available everywhere Watch Duty operates. For now, the company has made clear that flood warnings are no longer an extra report on the side. They are part of the app’s core pitch: one screen, one alert system, and one more disaster people can see coming before it reaches their door.
