San Francisco, CA, June 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Watch Duty, the nonprofit known for reliable wildfire alerts, today launched flood coverage across the United States, marking the organization’s first major expansion beyond wildfires.
Existing flood alert systems are fragmented, slow, and hard to interpret in the moment — official warnings, precipitation data, and river gauges live in separate places, often in technical formats, and rarely on a clear map of the community at risk. Watch Duty’s flood product pulls those signals together on the same clear map that users already trust for wildfire, translating them into plain language and surfacing for early, community-level awareness before an event becomes an emergency.
During catastrophic flood events, Watch Duty’s trained network of reporters — many of them current or former first responders, dispatchers, and emergency management professionals — add live verification and context from on-the-ground emergency response teams for life-threatening situations. Reporting covers high-risk incidents for multiple types of flooding, as well as specific hazards like dam/levee failures and down bridges. Flood reporting leverages the same process, system, and network that became a primary resource for communities affected by disasters like the 2023 wildfires in Spokane, Washington, the South Fork and Salt Fires in New Mexico, and the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
“I built Watch Duty because I couldn’t get reliable information when my own community was on fire” said John Mills, cofounder and CEO of Watch Duty. “Flooding is the same story for so many Americans and has the same life and death stakes. We’ve seen the need to support communities living through other disasters for as long as we’ve been sending alerts. Today, we’re doing it.”
Recent events have further reinforced the importance of real-time, plain-language alerts during fast-moving events, with the catastrophic flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country in July 2025 proving to be one of the deadliest inland floods in U.S. history. Watch Duty’s expansion brings the same real-time approach to flooding that closed the information gap for wildfire — a gap that has not kept pace with the growing frequency and intensity of disaster events nationwide.
Beginning today, anyone in the United States can open the Watch Duty app and see real-time flood data and mapping alongside the wildfire coverage that more than 16 million users relied on last year. As with wildfire information, flood coverage is included in the app at no cost and free of ads.
About Watch Duty
Watch Duty is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that delivers real-time alerts and situational intelligence for wildfires and floods across all 50 U.S. states. Its nationwide network of active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, and emergency responders monitor radio traffic and verified sources around the clock, supported by technology that scans publicly available data. Watch Duty’s work supports millions of residents, first responders, and emergency managers and has been featured as Fast Company’s #1 most innovative nonprofit and among TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies.
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