At 4 a.m. one morning when entrepreneur Maxwell Brodie was 11 years old, a lightning strike started a wildfire in a park near his home in British Columbia.
“No one was able to get to it until several hours after sunrise, by which time it was the classic story: It was too late,” Brodie says. “The winds had picked up. By the time all was said and done, over 30,000 people were evacuated. I remember standing on our roof with my dad, nailing a hose to the cedar roof to leave the water dripping while a police officer was at the bottom of our driveway with a megaphone ordering us to leave. You couldn’t see 30 feet in front of your face because of the smoke.”
The family’s house survived, though many neighbors lost their homes. Brodie later moved to California to launch a software startup, but never forgot the fire. Then, when the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018, he decided to pivot to work on wildfire tech. He wanted to focus on a common problem: Even when a wildfire is detected quickly, firefighters sometimes can’t arrive soon enough to stop it.
His startup, Rain, makes software that gives autonomous helicopters the ability to respond to wildfires. Fire agencies could use the tech to put a network of helicopters in place in remote locations, ready to respond as soon as a fire is detected.
“It’s all about reducing response time to catch the fires at their earliest stage, and arriving with enough speed and force to extinguish, contain, or slow the fire before it grows out of control,” Brodie says. “So you give the frontline firefighters a chance to get in there and complete the job.”
Getting to fires faster
Other startups have already started deploying networks of cameras in remote areas, using AI to spot smoke and automatically alert firefighters. CalFire recently credited an AI-powered camera with detecting a fire in the Santa Cruz mountains in time for fire crews to respond and put it out. “That’s been an incredible success and really the first half of the equation,” he says. “If you have early detection, then you can couple it with rapid response.” But because fires can be hard to reach quickly, early detection isn’t always enough: Autonomous helicopters can help.
A few decades ago, the “initial attack” on wildfires in California could take hours. Over the past decade, CalFire, the state’s fire agency, set a new standard to get to fires within 20 minutes. But if it’s very hot and dry, it can be necessary to respond even faster to be able to put out a fire.
“When we run simulations, we see in some cases, you’ve got to be there in four minutes,” says Brodie. “In other cases, seven minutes . . . I think what we’re seeing now is because of climate change and we’re seeing fires that require an even faster response time.”
The company’s software helps identify a fire and understand its behavior, making strategic decisions about how water or fire suppressant should be dropped. It considers factors like whether another helicopter is nearby or how the wind is blowing. “If you don’t account for wind, then when you make the drop, the water can end up nowhere near the fire,” says Brodie. Using the software, a supervisor on the ground could simultaneously control multiple aircraft.
Autonomy helps not just with speed but with safety. In the last couple of months alone, four aerial firefighters have died in accidents in the U.S. and Canada. Autonomous helicopter tech itself is being tested in many other applications, as well.
Tests show that it works
Last December, the startup worked with Sikorski, the company that makes Black Hawk military helicopters, to test a helicopter’s ability to find a fire and then extinguish it. In May, another test showed how the software can adjust for wind speeds to plan where to drop water.
By next year, the technology could be in use with some agencies. CalFire already has around 200 helicopters that could potentially use the software. (Around 40 are in use now on the Park Fire alone, though by the point a fire is massive, they’re less useful.) Though owning and using a fleet of helicopters is expensive, catching a fire early has an outsize impact. One study found that a 15-minute reduction in wildfire response time could generate billions in economic benefits for California.
That doesn’t mean that every fire should be extinguished. Wildfires in the West are often so massive now because all fires have been suppressed for decades, building up piles of fuel. Low-intensity fires are good for the landscape. “Prescribed” burns, started and managed by fire crews under the right weather conditions, are an important tool. Helicopters using Aero’s software could also be used in those cases as a backup in case a fire starts to spread too much. The rest of the time, the goal isn’t to stop “good” fire, but to stop fires that have the risk to explode into high-intensity blazes, destroying vast swaths of ecosystems and threatening communities.
A climate feedback loop
Reducing fires is also critical for climate change. “The 2020 wildfire season undid all greenhouse gas emissions progress in California over the last two decades,” Brodie says. “It’s like every solar panel, every electric vehicle, every power plant, every carbon capture project, all zeroed out because of a single wildfire season.” Last year, Canada’s out-of-control wildfires emitted six times more CO2 than all emissions from the entire California economy.
“There has been a shift over the past five or so years,” Brodie says. “Fire used to be considered part of natural land use in global carbon accounting. It has become increasingly evident that the fires that we’re seeing are not natural—that they are caused by humans as part of human-caused climate change. The scary thing is that it is a climate flywheel. The hotter it gets, the larger and more intense these fires are going to burn, and the more carbon they release. That continues to perpetuate the cycle.”
Fast Company © 2024 Mansueto Ventures, LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
