New app to provide California wildfire updates to the public directly from fire agencies

National admin September 6, 2026 0 Comments

New app to provide California wildfire updates to the public directly from fire agencies

SAN DIEGO – As wildfires ravaged Southern California in January 2025, millions of people turned to Cal Fire’s website for information on the Eaton and Palisades fires, checking on evacuation orders and looking at maps tracing the destructive path of flames.

Looking back, state fire officials noted that around 75 million users had visited the state website over the three-plus weeks that the Los Angeles County blazes raged – and about 85% of users were logging on from mobile devices.

They decided it was a good time to create an app that could better provide information to people using digital devices.

The result is AwareCA, a statewide public safety app designed to deliver “fast, trusted, first-responder verified” fire information directly from emergency agencies to those who download the app. The application was developed and is owned by Intterra, a public safety software company, and is available for free from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

The official launch of the app is expected to occur later this month.

Fire agencies that participate with the app will pay a licensing fee to Intterra, ranging from $12,000 to $500,000 a year. So far, more than 60 agencies have signed on, with another 60 in the process of doing so, said company CEO Robert Wolf. If all 120 get on board, the app will cover roughly 75% of the state’s population.

According to Intterra, the San Diego County Fire Protection District and Deer Springs Fire Protection District are participating in the app, while the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department has provided feedback and indicated an interest in the project.

A Fire-Rescue spokesperson noted that the city has not entered into a contract or committed funding at this time. She said the AwareCA app would provide “an additional channel to share timely, verified updates directly from Incident Command with the public in one centralized location,” which could help “improve situational awareness, reduce confusion and limit the spread of unverified information.”

For the agencies, the app is “very easy” to use, Wolf said. Information on calls for service, fire perimeters, road closures, evacuations and weather information are among the data feeds that are fully automated. “Additionally, an authorized user can make a post and add pictures and videos using a mobile phone or any browser,” Wolf said.

The app and Cal Fire’s website at fire.ca.gov will generally be “in sync” with the updates, he said.

Early in the process, the decision was made not to have the app only serve Cal Fire, but to open it up to include other fire agencies in the state.

“I give a huge amount of credit to Cal Fire for taking the patch off their arm, and (for) creating a solution that was statewide for all agencies,” Wolf said. “We recognized that the agencies needed a way to communicate to the public, but the public doesn’t want to download … apps for all the agencies in California. They want one place to go.”

Other states may decide to follow California’s lead and create similar platforms to use with multiple agencies, Wolf said.

From the user side, the AwareCA app is a map-based experience. It allows people to register up to 10 locations, set the size of the area they want to monitor and pick their notification preferences. Each agency can decide the level of information to share, with some including medical calls and other 911 calls for service along with fire calls.

Users pick from drop-down menus to determine what they want to see, including radio broadcast feeds, videos and tracking of firefighting aircraft flights in 2D or 3D.

The app is being launched at a time when cellphone users already have several options to track emergencies such as fires. One of the best-known is the Watch Duty app, which was started by a nonprofit in 2021 focused on California.

“When catastrophic fire or flooding strikes, official alerts often arrive too late – after homes are burning and towns are underwater,” Watch Duty says on its website. “Watch Duty fixes that. We deliver real-time wildfire and flood alerts and on-the-ground intelligence from first responders, such as how fast a fire is moving, which direction, when it crosses containment lines. That insight gives millions of Americans the information they need to act.”

Watch Duty says it relies on official sources, radio scanner traffic and confirmed on-scene reports to provide updates to its users.

Some fire officials have said it is good for getting information out quickly, but at times the app has reported preliminary information that later changed.

Wolf praised Watch Duty for filling a valuable role during emergencies.

“My purpose is not to bash Watch Duty. They filled a gap, they filled a need. And overall did a good job of that,” he said. “I think where there is the telephone game, where they picked up something that wasn’t 100% accurate, that can be super challenging.”

AwareCA said it differs by providing “authoritative information directly from the source” to users.

“If Watch Duty or any other social media app or social networking app wants to use that data to amplify that message, that’s fantastic,” Wolf said.

For their part, Watch Duty officials said they welcomed the new app to alert people about dangerous conditions. The company said more than 30 million people have downloaded its app, which now covers 50 states.

“More ways of getting emergency information makes communities more resilient – we’re big supporters of all efforts to bring communities clear, actionable information, and we hope this new app succeeds in adding a resource,” a company spokesperson said in an email.

Watch Duty said it draws from Cal Fire’s official data along with other sources, including U.S. Forest Service data. “We’ve found that combination is what makes information most useful: real people with training and experience cross-referencing it, making things clearer when incidents get chaotic.”

In its marketing material, AwareCA calls itself “California’s official channel” and says it was built specifically to “strengthen the trust” between first responders and communities.

The app has been in beta testing for the past several months. There have been several fixes as decisions were made about how best to display information. One example was how fire perimeters were displayed.

“We were originally displaying each time a new perimeter was created. It would show up, and they would stack on top of each other. We were thinking the community would want to see the progression of the fires,” Wolf said. “It ended up in many cases looking like spaghetti.”

That’s been changed, so the map now only shows the latest perimeter.

Cal Fire spokesperson Capt. Brent Pascua was among those reviewing early versions of the app, and he said he thinks it will prove useful.

“Of course, there have been some minor bugs we’ve had to work through and change,” he said. Pascua especially likes how the app displays firefighting aircraft in 3D and gives people the ability to listen to radio calls and see firefighting videos. “It is a really cool app,” he said.

This story was originally published September 6, 2026 at 8:03 AM.