California wildfires: Fighting infernos with Silicon Valley tech

“The technology adoption we’ve seen over the last three years has exploded,” Munsey said.During the Santa Cruz Mountains fire last year, one in a series of huge blazes sparked by dry lightning, Bay Area startup Zonehaven’s map-based evacuation software for official and citizen use went live in what CEO Charlie Crocker described as “our trial by fire.”Zonehaven was founded in 2018, and already, Cal Fire and dozens of other agencies and local governments — including Santa Clara, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Alameda counties — are adopting it to coordinate the safe exodus of people from threatened areas. “Let us fly.”Capella Space, a San Francisco company that has four satellites in orbit that can provide detailed landscape photos day or night, through clouds or smoke, plans to pitch its services to Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service so the agencies could “provide rapid information to the people on the ground to ensure that when they go into an area they know what to expect,” said Dan Getman, vice-president of product.Stanford University materials science professor Eric Appel, who led development of a fire-stopping gel for roadsides, said caution about new firefighting technology is warranted “because people have also been trying to sell snake oil in this field for a long time.” While Cal Fire’s emergency funding in 2020-21 skyrocketed from an initial $360 million to more than $1 billion by the end of 2020 — paying for more firefighters and aircraft — money for new technologies is comparatively scarce, said Appel.Phillip SeLegue, deputy chief of Cal Fire’s Intel unit, said the agency is responding to technological change along with environmental change and pointed to its adoption of data-processing platform Technosylva, which forecasts, monitors, and predicts fires and their spread.