A sheriff in Southern Colorado posted a frightening map on social media this month. It depicted an angry red zone, dotted with flame icons, where wildfires were burning. And a blue zone nearby showed where floods threatened, too.

The graphic wasn’t from the National Weather Service or Federal Emergency Management Agency. It came from a smartphone app.

The mapping and forecasting provided by this app, Watch Duty, are quickly becoming indispensable for emergency authorities, utility crews and residents in parts of the country that, until recently, seemed relatively safe from fires and floods alike.

Watch Duty began culling disaster data from government warnings, weather forecasts, radio scanners and social media five years ago to help residents of a few California counties track wildfires and plan evacuations. Since then, it’s boomed.

In January 2025, after a firestorm swept through Los Angeles, millions of new users joined. Utilities and philanthropic groups have sent millions of dollars to help expand the app’s focus. And this year, it has started to cover wildfires on the East Coast and widespread threats of sudden catastrophic flooding in other regions, too.

The changing climate means existing systems for dealing with disasters haven’t always kept pace with hazards. But Watch Duty is growing more like a tech start-up than the public-service-oriented nonprofit it is.

“People are hungry for information,” said Yusra Kauppila, a regional captain for Watch Duty, one of the dozens of paid staff members and volunteers who gather and vet the data shared with users.

The app has attracted 10 million unique users this year, the organization said, putting it on a pace to surpass the nearly 17 million users it reported in 2025.

Despite recent floods in Texas and fires in Minnesota, 2026 has been a relatively quiet period for disasters in the United States. But there’s been a steady surge in climate-change-fueled wildfires and flooding rains over the past several decades. The most damaging disasters cost the United States more than $100 billion last year, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit group.

Global warming, caused by fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect, is increasing both the atmosphere’s capacity to produce heavy downpours and its ability to rapidly dry out fire-prone landscapes. A developing and potentially record-setting episode of the El Niño climate pattern could intensify some floods over the next year, while diminishing Atlantic hurricane risks.

Elected officials and disaster preparedness groups have raised concern about the government’s ability to respond to such emergencies. President Trump has significantly cut budgets and staff for agencies like the Weather Service and FEMA since he returned to office.

Watch Duty relies heavily on all levels of government to keep its users updated, said John Clarke Mills, its co-founder and chief executive. But it still provides a service those agencies cannot, using technological know-how that the government hasn’t been able to muster as quickly.

“If they’re not going to do it, we’re going to do it,” Mr. Mills said. “If they put us out of business, great.”

Demand keeps rising.

As many as 1,000 people were subscribing per hour to alerts in Florida and Georgia as wildfires spread across the South this spring, giving Watch Duty 127,000 users there within about six months of launching coverage.

The organization began tracking floods in June. A few weeks later, more than a foot of rain fell on parts of Missouri within a few hours, and its page dedicated to the incident quickly garnered 37,000 views, the nonprofit said. The day had started with only about 300 subscribers in the area, Ms. Kauppila said.

Watch Duty is free, but users can pay $25 or $100 annually for upgraded memberships that allow subscriptions to alerts in unlimited numbers of U.S. counties, or extra layers of mapping data on variables such as public land ownership. In 2025, more than 111,000 people paid for the $25 tier, twice as many as a year earlier.

Some companies have found the app valuable, too. Watch Duty said it signed $1 million in recurring contracts with utilities, telecommunications companies and railroads last year, and it expects to more than double that this year.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility serving 16 million Californians, is among its heaviest users. PG&E admitted responsibility for the deaths of more than 80 people in the 2018 Camp fire in Butte County, Calif., which utility equipment ignited.

More than 4,000 of PG&E’s 29,000 employees use an internal version of Watch Duty that maps out power infrastructure alongside the app’s fire data, giving them information that helps them protect themselves, communities and the utility’s equipment, said Logan Monroe, the utility’s senior manager of wildfire risk management.

Evaluating how power systems and fires might interact once required hours of cross-referencing internal maps with fire data, Mr. Monroe said. Now, Watch Duty sends fire alerts to his smartphone.

“That’s a three-second investigation,” Mr. Monroe said.

Other apps finding an audience during disasters include MyRadar, popular among tornado watchers, and American Red Cross Emergency, which helps people prepare for and recover from disasters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the Weather Service, has its own radar app and issues wireless alerts for tornadoes and flash floods.

Even with Watch Duty, some communities could struggle to keep up with evolving disaster threats. In Eastern Kentucky, for example, officials are still trying to improve their readiness for unpredictable and deadly floods like those that hit in 2022.

Watch Duty’s new flood coverage could help. But steep topography, limited hydrology data and a lack of access to smartphones and cell service could nonetheless make it difficult to ensure the next flood will come with enough warning, said Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, a nonprofit law firm that advocates for climate resilience.

“We really need something that is going to wake people up in the middle of the night, or give them advance notice so they’re watching,” Ms. Shelton said. “We need better info at the community level that’s actionable.”

Mr. Mills acknowledged the challenge, but he said Watch Duty’s rapid growth in areas facing fresh disaster threats shows it’s serving people’s needs.

If a quiet fire or hurricane season means fewer people use Watch Duty, that’s OK with Mr. Mills, he said. “The app isn’t built for attention,” he said. “It’s built for safety.”

Taylor Farms, one of the nation’s largest producers of leafy greens and fresh vegetables, said on Friday that it would remove its products at the center of a cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened more than 1,600 people.

Based in California, the family-owned company is in the spotlight after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked an outbreak of cyclosporiasis to iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms supplied to certain Taco Bell restaurants, according to two federal officials who declined to be named Thursday night.

The company said in an email Friday that it had “promptly initiated a voluntary removal of product” based on information provided by the Food and Drug Administration this week. “We are committed to taking proactive actions,” the company said.

Taylor Farms was founded in 1995 by Bruce Taylor, the third generation of an agricultural family in California’s Salinas Valley, the so-called salad bowl of the world.

Today, Taylor Farms is a vegetable behemoth, selling more than $7 billion worth of produce each year to grocery stores and restaurant chains. It grows food in more than a dozen states, as well as in Mexico and Canada, and has 30 processing facilities and 25,000 employees. Last year it said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries and provided 265 million servings of fresh vegetables each week.

But much of its sales to grocery retailers and restaurants are a mystery. The company — like other food producers — does not disclose which grocery stores or restaurants use its leafy greens or other vegetables.

Adding to the confusion, Taylor Farms sells most of its products to food distributors, who, in turn, sell them to restaurants and grocery stores.

For consumers, that uncertainty made them look at their lunchtime meals a bit differently this week. Was it safe to eat an arugula salad at lunch? Could shredded lettuce be added to a burrito?

“I’m not taking chances. It’s not worth it,” said Caren Bordowitz, who works in marketing at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Ill., as she passed on her usual purchase of a bag of lettuce from her local supermarket.

“Consumers rarely know where their fresh produce comes from, and cannot discern between romaine grown here or grown there,” said Joelle Mosso, the associate vice president of science programs at the Western Growers Association, an industry group.

The C.D.C. is advising consumers to not eat the lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The agency has stated that iceberg lettuce at grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not impacted.

However Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, said in an emailed statement Friday evening that it was withdrawing all iceberg lettuce products from Mexico in its supply chain at the request of Taylor Farms.

“We will continue to actively monitor the situation and work with regulators as needed,” the company said, adding that it stopped selling and distributing those Taylor Farms products on Thursday.

On Thursday night Taco Bell said it was removing “potentially impacted lettuce from a supplier in select states.” It did not name the supplier or the states. By Friday evening, the fast-food chain said it had removed the affected Taylor Farms lettuce from its restaurants and supply chain nationwide, based on “conversations with public health officials and out of an abundance of caution.”

Shares of Yum Brands, which owns the restaurant chain, slid nearly 9 percent this week.

Illness from cyclosporiasis is seasonal and tends to peak during the summer months. However, the United States is on track to have more cyclosporiasis cases in 2026 than in any previous year.

And while much of the current investigation is focusing on the outbreak involving iceberg lettuce sold to some Taco Bell locations, health officials are also investigating illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated, the C.D.C. said in its notice posted Thursday night.

For years, Taylor Foods has emphasized the importance of safety in the lettuce and the other produce it grows, knowing one incident can quickly wipe out consumer trust.

“Our whole industry relies on consumer confidence in the health and safety of our products,” Mr. Taylor said in an interview published earlier this year in Western Farm Press, a trade publication that focuses on farmers and ranchers. “All we can do is make sure we’re taking the steps that we know to take to ensure we’re producing safe food for our fellow Americans.”

The F.D.A.’s investigation into the outbreak appears to be focused on a farm in Mexico that grew the iceberg lettuce, and a facility nearby that shredded it, according to administration officials.

Taylor Farms has two processing facilities in Mexico, one in Baja California and another in Guanajuato.

Food and safety experts said this cyclosporiasis outbreak demonstrated the difficulty in completely eliminating risk from a food supply chain that often stretches across multiple countries and a number of growers, packagers, distributors and sellers who operate under different laws and with different food safety standards.

Over the years, Taylor Farms has been linked to previous outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. In 2013, following three recalls, the company was investigated by health officials in connection with an outbreak of illness that sickened hundreds of people in 22 states that involved greens used at Olive Garden, Red Lobster and possibly other restaurant chains.

More recently, health officials considered the company a likely source of an E. coli outbreak linked to onions served at McDonald’s in 2024 that resulted in 104 illnesses, 34 hospitalizations and one death. In October of that year, Taylor Farms recalled yellow onions.

Mr. Taylor, the company’s founder, has played a powerful role in the fresh produce industry. When two major produce associations joined forces in 2022 to form the International Fresh Produce Association, he was the inaugural chairman.

He has helped shape rules and regulations for the leafy greens industry. After an E. coli outbreak in 2006 killed three people, Mr. Taylor and other growers helped create the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, a food safety coalition funded by growers but administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Members of the agreement must adhere to food safety practices that go beyond what is required by the federal Agriculture Department or the F.D.A., including scheduled and unscheduled audits of their fields and processing systems.

Concern across California about an invasive insect has sent officials in one county in the northern part of the state on a door-to-door mission to collect potentially infested grapevines sold at some Costco stores.

The insect, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, was found on vines sold at select Costco locations in Santa Clara County, which includes the cities of Palo Alto, San Jose and Santa Clara, between April 21 and May 19, the county’s Division of Agriculture said in a news release. The vines and other potentially infested plants were also sold in other parts of the state.

Glassy-winged sharpshooters are native to the American Southeast and northeast Mexico and are considered an invasive pest in California. They can spread Pierce’s disease, which is fatal to grapevines and can harm local vineyards, nurseries and farms, officials said, with the potential to devastate the state’s $73 billion wine industry. The insect can also damage citrus trees, landscape plants and other crops.

The first severe threat came in August 1999 in Riverside County, when over 300 acres of grapevines infested with the glassy-winged sharpshooter were infected with Pierce’s disease and ultimately destroyed.

More than 1,300 grapevine plants were sold to customers by Costco in Santa Clara County, the local agriculture agency said.

County workers began knocking on doors on Monday to distribute information and collection materials, including zip ties and plastic bags, to residents who had purchased the potentially infested plants, said Ericka Mora, Santa Clara County’s deputy agricultural commissioner. The state, working with Costco, provided the local authorities with customer information.

Residents are urged not to relocate, compost or dispose of the plants themselves because of the risk for the pest or the disease to spread, Ms. Mora said.

Scheduled pickups began on Wednesday, Ms. Mora said, though some plants were collected during Monday’s and Tuesday’s door-knocking operations. Initial efforts have been focused on the southern end of the county, particularly in Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Martin, home to many wineries.

Ms. Mora said residents had been cooperative so far. She did not have an immediate count of how many of the vines had yet to be collected from buyers.

Santa Clara is one of at least 24 counties where the infestation is a concern, according to a news release from the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

The department also warned that desert willow trees sold at Costco stores across 15 counties between June 24 and July 3 might also be affected.

Burchell Nursery’s Fresno facility, which shipped the potentially infested grapevines in May, has been placed under stricter treatment, inspection and shipping protocols, the department said. The nursery did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture said response and containment efforts included tracking down potentially affected grapevines and desert willows across the affected counties and neighboring at-risk counties; inspecting and safely disposing of the plants; and placing traps to monitor for the insect near stores and locations where purchased plants were taken.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture and Costco did not immediately respond to requests for comment.