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John Clarke Mills was in a zoom meeting when everything went to hell. It was half past 10 am on the morning of January 7, 2025, and Mills – Slim, profane, voice charred by years of smoking – spoke its free fire monitoring application, Monitoringto a colleague and one of his non -profit investors. Behind him, on the wall, was hung a giant photo of trees crowded with flames.
As CEO, Mills would normally pay particular attention to a meeting with people of money, but his eyes continued to go to notifications in the background. A few minutes earlier, a fire started at the start of the TemeScal Canyon trail in Pacific Palisades, California, 400 miles in the south. At 10:32 a.m., a camera at the University of California in San Diego Alertcalifornia The network attracted a view of the plume swollen with smoke. One of Watch Duty’s remote workers saw it in front of the camera and broke an image. At 10:33 am, he published it on the application with an anodal legend: “Resources respond to a fire of vegetation reported with visible smoke on the CANRA of the Canyon Temescal.” Twenty minutes later, the incident had a name. The palisades pull.
The wind caught the embers; The fire has spread. The firefighters responded, by moving trucks to fight the fire. Calfire – as the department of forestry and state fire protection is known First public report of the incident at 11:06. Mills updated everyone on the zoom. That, he said, would be bad.
No more flames. To the east, the Eaton fire lowered in the Altadena district. The sunset fire in the hills above Hollywood was small, a blip compared to the other two, but a drain on emergency resources. For next week, Los Angeles has become a city besieged by conflagration, confusion and loss. At least 29 people who died. Billions of dollars in destroyed goods. Whole districts – thousands of houses – damaged beyond repair or burned on the ground.
The workstations on the service on active fires in 22 states – their perimeter, evacuation zones, air quality notes – and send real -time notifications to its users. As the fires spread, 2.5 million new people downloaded the application, double in double its user base. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers mentioned it during their late evening shows. On social networks, people directly on the way to the Flames sang the praises of Watch Duty, deeply grateful for its existence.
Official evacuation orders are generally timely and instructive, but not always. If you live in Fire Country, you will have heard the stories on the evacuation orders sent to bad people or be sent too late—Aille people in houses that are Already burning. For residents threatened with fire, the surveillance service is often the only clear signal that cuts through a wall of diaphony and static.
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