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LOS ANGELES () — Much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood where Ring founder Jamie Siminoff once lived – including the garage where he invented the Ring video doorbell – was destroyed in the devastating wildfire.
Siminoff’s own home was spared, but the loss around him left a lasting impact.
“If we can take the pain that came from this and turn it into something positive, that’s what we should do,” Siminoff said.
That resolve led to the creation of Fire Watch, a newly announced safety feature from Ring designed to provide real-time, ground-level wildfire information to communities and first responders during active fire events.
Within days of the blaze, Siminoff reached out to John Mills, founder and CEO of Watch Duty, a nonprofit wildfire tracking and alert platform that became the most downloaded app in the aftermath of the January fires.
“My way of coping is engineering,” Mills said. “Same with Jamie. So we said, ‘Let’s just do this.’ We got on the phone, started talking and just began moving.”
Fire Watch is being developed through a collaboration between Ring and Watch Duty, which is dedicated to humanizing and accelerating emergency information. The feature will live in the Neighbors section of the Ring app and aims to deliver timely alerts, surface critical insights for first responders and keep communities better informed when every second counts.
The system includes three main components: real-time fire alerts powered by Watch Duty, AI-driven smoke and fire detection, and voluntary community contributions from Ring users.
“I knew that we could take what we have with Ring – the Ring network, our Ring neighbors – put it together with Watch Duty and build something so that in the next fire we can add more information and get more situational awareness quicker to everybody,” Siminoff said.
Using artificial intelligence, Fire Watch will analyze images captured by Ring cameras to identify smoke, embers and active flames. Siminoff estimates there were more than 10,000 Ring cameras operating in Pacific Palisades during the fire, each capturing potentially critical information in real time.
“We have all these videos of fire in people’s backyards, embers blowing around,” Siminoff said. “If we could have fed that into Watch Duty, I do think the amount of resources in the Palisades could have been better deployed. I don’t think we would have stopped this, but I think we could have stopped some of it. Some families would still have houses.”
Under the new system, Ring camera owners will be able to voluntarily opt in to share periodic snapshots with Watch Duty during fire events. Those images can help enhance Watch Duty’s reporting and provide first responders with additional, on-the-ground intelligence.
“If there’s a fire spreading toward your neighborhood, we’ve got to try to catch it while it’s spreading – not once it’s already become a major incident,” Siminoff said.
When Fire Watch rolls out in the coming months, alerts and images will feed directly into the Watch Duty app, adding visual confirmation to a platform that already centralizes evacuation orders, red flag warnings and other essential emergency information.
Mills said the partnership grew out of a shared desire to help communities respond faster to increasingly frequent and destructive wildfires.
“We just wanted to be of service,” Mills said. “A lot of us have lived through this experience in California and across the West. We couldn’t just sit by and let it keep happening.”
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