The nonprofit Watch Duty is partnering with Ring, the Amazon-owned maker of doorbell cameras, to help users share videos of nearby wildfires on Watch Duty’s wildfire tracking app.
The result is Fire Watch, a new feature being added to Ring’s Neighbors app, the stand-alone service that lets users see activity from nearby Ring cameras. If there is a fire in the area, users will be notified and can go into an emergency mode that lets them share videos from their Ring cameras to the feed about that specific fire on Watch Duty’s platform.
Courtesy of Ring
It's not a posting free-for-all; Watch Duty says it will choose which Ring videos to show in Fire Watch, based on relevance. Ring says Fire Watch will roll out to Neighborhood app users this spring.
The announcement comes at the one year anniversary of the 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles, which leveled entire neighborhoods, caused billions of dollars in damage, killed 30 people in the flames, and led to more than 400 deaths in total.
Watch Duty, which lets users track wildfires and receive minute-by-minute updates about a blaze’s path and perimeter, became something of a lifeline for desperate LA residents looking for timely fire information. The mobile app saw 2.5 million new downloads during the LA fires and was widely hailed as a necessary resource.
One newfound Watch Duty user was Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring. While not at Ring at the time, he later rejoined the company after the Palisades fire burned his garage and parts of the back of his house. The experience of searching for information about where the fire was made him think that the Ring cameras all around him should have helped.
“While I'm in it, I thought, why are we not doing this? And why are we not doing that?” Siminoff says. “A big part of why I wanted to come back was to do things like this with the Ring network and with our Ring customers.”
Fire Watch gets its real-time fire alerts from Watch Duty, and the feature notifies Neighbors users if a fire is nearby. There is also a feature to accept “voluntary community contributions” that lets Ring users opt in to sharing shots from their smart-home cameras with Watch Duty.
Courtesy of Ring Courtesy of Ring
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