Category: Innovation

Sorting and sharing in the world of new technology

Wildfire agencies are regularly approached by companies spruiking the next best thing in innovation for wildfire prevention, preparedness, detection, response, recovery or fuels management.

The decision to adopt, or to not adopt, any particular innovation is a difficult one that straddles the competing priorities of budget limitations, risk appetite and technological wisdom. How do you know if this is any good? How can we decide if it is worth paying for? Who else is using it?

Firetech Labs has taken up these challenges of innovation adoption with a platform that allows organisations to share insights and track who else is looking at what.

Firetech Labs started in 2025 as a successor to Firetech Connect, a startup hub out of Noosa Council, north of Brisbane, Queensland in Australia. Initially focused on Australia, it now works internationally.

In Canada, Firetech Labs worked with FP Innovations on the recently released Innovation Adoption Framework for the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada. This free and public framework to access technology was a pre-cursor for the development of Firetech Labs online platform – Heyden – that allows agencies share their results.

Heyden coordinates innovation efforts across agencies and groups of agencies that agree to share their data. It shows what technology others are evaluating, piloting and using operationally.

Firetech has just returned from presenting to the World Fire Congress in the United Kingdom, after presenting at the AFAC2026 Intershutz conference in Australia. CEO Connor Wilson noted that despite the interest in innovation, most fire chiefs the world over had a low appetite for risk.

“A standout question at WFC from a European Fire Chief was how do we prove value for money in adopting these tools? Agencies are challenged in that they have tight budgets of public monies and therefore have a very low appetite for procurement risk. They have limited baseline data to measure the current performance of a system which means quantifying improvements is difficult.

Innovation is listed as an organisational priority in most fire agencies, federal governments and other wildland fire, including AFAC and the World Fire Congress, but the problem is how to practically access it all and find the right fit.

“Increasing fire severity globally has caused the sector to boom with an influx of government and private investment, with startups and large companies, like Anduril and Airbus, announcing new fire tech innovations.

“The challenge is that these innovations are getting stuck at the door of the agencies. The agencies are tackling the same challenges and require a collaboration platform to share corporate knowledge and lessons learned on the evaluation and adoption of these technologies.

Wilson says that Firetech Labs’ Heyden allows agencies to manage their internal innovation process and also conduct market research on technologies being tested, trialed and adopted across a family of fire agencies, reducing duplication of effort, improving the efficiency of technology adoption. Users can create a free account to view the listings and upgrade to a paid account to access all the features.

Winning ideas to transform wildfire detection and response

Teams from across the world have competed to build transformative technology for wildfire detection and response. The winners were given hundreds of thousands of dollars to continue their development.

The teams were awarded the funds at the XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Awardee Ceremony at the New York City Fire Museum on Sept. 23. Nine of the 124 teams ended up winning prize money for their inventions focusing on either Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence and Autonomous Wildfire Response.

Along with the prize money, each winner will move forward to XPRIZE’s “Impact Phase,” which will use field trials to translate the technologies into real-world solutions for wildfire management.

“The awardee announcement marks an important milestone in the fight against destructive wildfires, but the breakthroughs that emerged from the competition are only the beginning,” XPRIZE said in a press release. “By catalyzing technological innovation and collaboration between innovators and wildfire experts, XPRIZE Wildfire has helped spur the development, adoption and investment needed to strengthen the accuracy of wildfire detection and the speed of response.”

The winners in the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence section, according to the XPRIZE website, included:

First Place – System Integration Awardee, $500,000: SIRIUS Wildfire Alliance
SIRIUS Wildfire Alliance demonstrated comprehensive end-to-end and system integration methodology, integrating SAR and optical data to support fire characterization and spread modeling.
Second Place – Methodological Innovation Awardee, $250,000: Team Snuffed
Team Snuffed developed a probabilistic data-fusion framework designed to provide transparent, auditable and uncertainty-aware wildfire detection, with strong firefighter-facing usability.
Special Recognition, Commercial Viability, $100,000: MyRadar
As a commercially mature team, MyRadar utilized upstream satellite acquisition and demonstrated spatial precision.
Special Recognition, Operational Deliverable, $100,000: DeepFire
DeepFire demonstrated an operational fire-spread-alert capability designed to support wildfire detection and intelligence.
Special Recognition, Innovative Algorithm Application, $100,000: Mayday.AI
Mayday.AI applied an algorithm originally developed for volcanic-ash detection to identify wildfire smoke plumes through cloud cover.

The winners of the Autonomous Wildfire Response section included:

First Place Awardee, $1.2 Million: Anduril Industries
Anduril’s modular Lattice software platform provided a detection-to-suppression integrated pathway for cameras, sensors, and drones.
Second Place Awardee, $800,000: Dryad Networks
Dryad’s Silvanet, a 170-sensor persistent field network, combined with their Silvaguard drones, demonstrated end-to-end autonomy.
Third Place Awardee, $500,000: AURA Foresight
AURA successfully demonstrated autonomous and persistent detection, meeting the critical 10-minute detection gate.
Lockheed Martin Accurate Detection & Intelligence Bonus Prize, $1,000,000: Anduril Industries
Recognized for their rapid and precise multi-sensor detector performance.

Using a bot to help burn more fuel, more often

Burn Bot is large, tank-like vehicle that wants to solve the most troubling of fuel mitigation questions – how can you manage more area, across all sorts of terrain, in all sorts of weather, at all times of the year, without overtaxing or endangering local crews, and without smothering communities with smoke?

Mechanical fuel mitigation is not new, nor are air curtain burners (AirBurners, for example) or other mobile burning units (See the Blacklining Machine we wrote about in 2011). Burn Bot is a remotely operated, moving fire box that offers a neat option to burn at scale over extended windows across large areas of open terrain or in strategic or sensitive areas.

And neat is the word – Burn Bot can establish a remarkably clean and straight firebreak or containment line. Burn Bot hopes this will attract those who conduct roadside burns, or fuel reduction under powerlines or near sensitive built up areas such as schools, aged care centres or the other community hubs.

After establishing itself on the west coast in the United States, with a base in San Francisco, a single Burn Bot vehicle has just arrived in south-east Queensland, Australia.

It sparked a fair bit of interest at the recent AFAC2026 Fire and Emergency Services conference trade show in Melbourne where Head of Australia for Burn Bot, Clinton Neumann, pitched it as a bigger and better way to get loads more fuel mitigation completed.

“What we are looking to do is to scale up the amount of treatment that can happen across landscapes, to mitigate the impact of destructive wildfires. One of the constraints of prescribed fire is the weather window, where the opportunity to put in prescribed fire becomes increasingly complex and more limited,” says Neumann.

“Because we can control the temperatures in the chamber and dial it up to suite the fuel bed you are operating in, it really gives you a much broader range of operating conditions. You can burn really uncured, green grass, right through to conditions that would be a bit marginal for open burning. It stretches the envelope at both ends.”

The three rows of propane burners aim to operate between 750 to 800 degrees Celsius, with an upper limit of 1100 degrees Celsius, inside the combustion chamber. It travels at the walking pace of the operator beside it with the remote-control device, with a spotter close by to make it a two-person operation at a minimum. The unit has water sprayers all round to catch any escapes but in most circumstances there is also a local crew present on a tanker.

In conditions considered less suitable for the Burn Bot (dense forests, rocky ground, steep gullies), the company brings in its other remote-controlled machines including mulchers or traditional hand-held means.

It is early days for considering it for use in suppression work. It would be a brave fire manager who brought it into a landscape already in a wildfire situation, but under some circumstances it could be used for containment lines.

“Potentially, it could be used for defensive firing operations, where you have got a lot of open edge and grassy country. It’s capable of burning 24-7, so overnight work to put in containment lines could be a good use for it.”

The almost absence of smoke is the other aspect that caught people’s attention at the AFAC2026 expo. With such high temperatures in the fully contained chamber, the amount of combustion smoke is minimal.

“Most of the product you see coming out is actually steam from the moisture content in the fuel…We did some comparisons with open burning and with air curtain burners and things like that, and it performs pretty well.”

The lack of prescribed burning smoke is appealing to complex environments, such as in California, which have strict requirements on air quality. “In California, which is the most complex environment we operate in, it is often exempt from any of the air quality permit requirements.”

Burn Bot is pitching its service to a range of potential users – fire and land agencies, state and local government, large private land holders and utilities. The plan is not so much to sell the units, but to offer a full-service fuel mitigation business where the Burn Bot is one component alongside mulching and other conventional methods.

How drones can better integrate with total incident response

By Usama Mehboob

Wildfire drone operations have moved beyond the question of whether an unmanned aircraft can find heat or provide an overhead view. The harder problem is fitting another aircraft and another stream of data into an incident that may already involve helicopters, air tankers, lead planes, ground crews and changing airspace restrictions. For response professionals, useful drone work starts with aviation integration, disciplined mission planning and a clear path from observation to action.

Airspace Coordination Comes Before Sensor Capability

Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFR) around active wildfires are intended to protect firefighting aircraft and crews. Unauthorized drones can interrupt crewed aviation, yet authorized public safety flights still have to fit inside the same incident aviation structure. A technically successful mission can become an operational problem if the aircraft location, altitude or flight window conflicts with a helicopter or tanker assignment.

Authorized drone operations on active wildfires already work within established incident command and aviation structures. The challenge is maintaining that integration as UAS missions become more frequent, longer-range and increasingly complex. A drone may be operating under incident authority, but its flight area, altitude, timing, communications and data requirements still have to remain aligned with changing crewed-aircraft operations throughout the operational period.

For that reason, UAS coordination should extend beyond initial flight approval. Flight areas, altitude limits, lost-link procedures and an immediate grounding process need to be understood before launch and reviewed as incident conditions change. TFR and NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) information can also change during an operational period, so a single preflight review is not enough for a long mission cycle.

Key operating priorities include:

Define operating areas and altitude limits before launch.
Keep direct coordination between Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) personnel and incident aviation staff.
Recheck TFR and NOTAM information as conditions change.
Give aviation supervisors clear authority to stop unmanned flights when crewed aircraft need the airspace.

Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) missions can extend observation beyond practical ground access, but range brings new problems. Communications reliability, aircraft tracking, detect and avoid methods and lost link behavior become part of the safety case. More distance is useful only when the incident team can still account for the aircraft and control the mission.

Drone Over a Smoking Forest Fire — Image created by ZenaDrone

Thermal Imaging Has Limits That Matter on a Fireground

Thermal imaging can support hotspot searches, perimeter assessment and detection of residual heat. The risk is treating a thermal image as a final answer. Vegetation, terrain, sensor angle, smoke, heated surfaces and distance can change what the operator sees. A bright signature may need field confirmation, and hidden combustion may remain difficult to characterize from one aerial pass.

Repeated observations tied to coordinates are often more useful than a single image. The operational question should be simple: what decision will this flight support? A drone that detects heat outside a containment line may provide valuable intelligence. That value drops very quickly if the location remains on the pilot display and does not reach the people assigning resources.

Endurance and Night Operations

Battery endurance is another practical constraint, particularly across large incidents. Published flight time matters less than usable mission time after wind, distance, payload, reserve requirements and repeated recovery cycles are considered. Crews may spend a surprising amount of the operational period managing batteries, charging and launch locations rather than collecting data.

Night flights can support thermal observation during periods of reduced visibility, but darkness changes the risk picture. Terrain references become harder to judge and recovery may require more planning. Night activity still needs to remain coordinated with other aviation. It cannot be assumed that the absence of daylight means the airspace is available.

Data Integration Is the Larger Opportunity

Wildfire agencies already collect large amounts of information. Drones can add thermal images, video, maps and coordinates at a pace that becomes difficult to use. The real objective is not collecting more data. It is moving a smaller amount of verified information to the right person soon enough to influence a decision.

Different agencies may arrive with different mapping platforms, radio systems and data procedures. This can make a simple location report harder to share than expected. Incident teams benefit when drone outputs use common geospatial formats and when responsibility for validating and distributing UAS intelligence is defined in advance.

Autonomous docking stations may make repeated observation easier by supporting automated launch, recovery and charging. They still require reliable communications, weather limits, updated airspace information and a clear way to interrupt a mission when incident priorities change. Autonomy can reduce routine workload, but it does not remove accountability to incident command.

The strongest wildfire use of drones is likely to come from integration rather than aircraft quantity. Better airspace deconfliction, disciplined thermal interpretation, practical BVLOS procedures and interoperable data sharing can make UAS missions more useful without adding unnecessary risk. Wildfire response does not need drones flying simply because they are available. It needs missions with a defined purpose, controlled access to the airspace and a direct connection between observation and action.

Usama Mehboob is a Content Writer at ZenaDrone Inc, covering drone technology, its applications and related industry developments. More at www.zenadrone.com/wildfires/

aerial firefighting drones

UK wildfire preparedness “decades” behind others

University of Birmingham researchers at a burn on Dorset Heath, United Kingdom.

By Dr Kerryn Little

Wildfire preparedness in the United Kingdom is decades behind others – and we are running out of time to catch up.

In New Zealand where I grew up, I was part of a volunteer rural fire brigade that specifically fought wildfires, and a national Fire Danger Rating System communicated elevated wildfire danger warnings (think road signs of wildfire danger level, like Australia and the USA have).

Given the similarities between New Zealand’s and the UK’s maritime climate and vegetation, I had imagined the UK was similarly equipped to deal with wildfires.

When I moved to the UK in 2020, I learned this was not the case at all – despite the fact that the UK experiences more vegetation fires (~30,000 annually) and has a much higher population density within the ‘rural-urban interface’ where vegetation and people, property and critical infrastructure co-exist.

Wildfire wave

Historically, the UK’s temperate, humid climate and vegetation have protected us from vegetation drying out enough to produce large and intense wildfires. But we are increasingly seeing years with hot, dry extremes that prime our vegetation for wildfires to spread. The UK has been experiencing a ‘wildfire wave’ in 2026 amidst heatwave and drought conditions, with extensive wildfires across the full length of the country. This comes off the back of the UK’s worst wildfire year on record in 2025 that burned nearly 48,000 hectares.

For decades, fire behaviour prediction tools have been a cornerstone of wildfire management in many countries. These tools forecast how a fire will behave – its probability of ignition, flame length, rate of spread – and that information underpins everything from firefighter training and suppression tactics to prescribed burn planning and long-term mitigation strategy. Countries with serious wildfire exposure have invested accordingly: Australia, Canada, the USA, several Mediterranean nations and NZ have each developed fire behaviour models built for, or adapted to, their own landscapes and fuels. However, until recently, the UK has lacked such tailored fire behaviour prediction tools.

University of Birmingham researchers and fire fighters, United Kingdom. — University of Birmingham researchers with fire fighters, United Kingdom.

Wildfire tools

To address this critical gap in decision-making support, wildfire researchers across the UK came together to create FireInSite – the UK’s first fire behaviour prediction system. FireInSite is specifically designed for the UK’s vegetation, having been built on over four years of UK-wide intensive data collection. The freely accessible web interface overcomes barriers to accessing fire behaviour predictions, by integrating geolocated weather forecasts, topography and in-built fuel models. FireInSite was developed closely with groups like the UK’s Wildfire Tactical Advisors to meet their user needs from a wildfire behaviour prediction tool. It has been used operationally since 2025, with user feedback and validation demonstrating its success across the 2025 and 2026 extreme wildfire seasons.

This work sits within a wider effort at the University of Birmingham to take natural hazard risk seriously. Our Network for Emerging Systemic and Multi-Hazard Risk brings together researchers from engineering, climate science, economics, and social sciences to understand how hazards like wildfire don’t just burn land – they can cascade into failures of power networks, water supply, and transport infrastructure. Real disasters rarely respect disciplinary boundaries, and neither should our research.

Consecutive extreme wildfire years in the UK have provided the awareness of and momentum to address the UK’s wildfire preparedness, and we are starting to make significant progress, FireInSite being one aspect of that.

The challenge is to sustain this momentum to keep pace with a threat that isn’t waiting for us to catch up.

Dr Kerryn Little, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in PyroGeography at the University of Birmingham, and a Director on the Board of the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Featured Article fire behavior United Kingdom

Bringing wildfire scenario planning to life

Capital Shield Foresight training scenario.

As fire and other emergencies become more complex, chaotic and concurrent, incident managers may find that traditional pre-season tabletop exercises struggle to cope with these new demands.

An emerging Australian company has seized the power of AI to develop a scenario package that moves faster, adapts to sudden changes, reacts to multiple pressures, and responds to decisions in real time, for better or for worse. Capital Shield’s Foresight platform is pitched as the next level full-dress rehearsal for wildfire and other emergency agencies.

The story starts back in 2020, when a group of undergraduates at the National Security College at the Australian National University established the Australian Crisis Simulation Summit. They brought together around 100 students from across Australia with Australian Government support to focus on realistic national security scenarios using a range of software platforms built for such exercises.

Tim Hobbs, CEO of Capital Shield, says the problem was that none of the platforms did what was actually needed. “They couldn’t generate a genuinely realistic exercise environment. We could build a compelling scenario on paper, but the tools couldn’t bring it to life.”

And so, Hobbs and his co-founder, Connor Kneebone, built a new software platform, using AI to lift the standard to include more complex, more dynamic scenarios, that can twist and turn in real time.

“It’s a browser-based environment built around doctrine that recreates the pressure of a real incident, with live spatial mapping, radio traffic, media calls, social media sentiment and stakeholder pressure all arriving at once, against a compressed operational clock,” he said.

“An agency can build a scenario in its own geography, with its own fuel loads, fire weather and community assets, then run its IMT through it. Because the environment is adaptive, the fire responds to the team’s decisions.”

Capital Shield has established relationships in the Defence and national security space with several Australian Government agencies using the platform, which links to the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS), or as needed, to a state emergency plan, or to an organisation’s own crisis management plan or competency standards.

Capital Shield was an exhibitor at the IAWF Fire Behaviour and Fuels conference in Hobart in April this year and attracted strong interest demonstrating Foresight.

Foresight is also aimed at international use with take-up by agencies in Germany and Japan, and early approaches being made in the US and Canada.

The exercise can be delivered by one facilitator in person or remotely, with participants in different places able to share the same simulation for fire, flood, storm or other events.

Hobbs says the platform offers a better option to static and scripted exercises in current use worldwide. “They are often PowerPoint-based, with a facilitator reading injects off a list and giving a subjective debrief at the end. Everyone agrees it’s a great way to learn, and it is. But the pressure isn’t real, the realism isn’t there, and performance isn’t measured.

“We’ve taken exercises to the next level. In Foresight you’re making the decisions you’d be expected to make on the day of a real incident, in a live, reactive environment, but a safe one. The fire responds to your suppression strategy, the media and the community push back through the same channels you’d really use, and the clock doesn’t wait.

“Then at the end it recalls all of it and gives you a structured after-action review: here’s how you went, here’s where the gaps were, measured against the doctrine your organisation actually operates under. So, it’s not just a better way to rehearse, it’s the first time most teams can demonstrate their readiness rather than assert it.”

For more on Foresight go to:

https://www.capitalshield.com.au

simulation training

Marcos Aerospace Unveils the Quencher concept

Quencher, a concept amphibious firefighting aircraft by Marcos Aeropace. (Photo AI generated and supplied by Marcos Aerospace)

This firefighting aircraft promises to do it all – amphibious, pilotless, day and night ops, fleet coordination and an AI brain.

Marcos Aerospace, a Greek aerospace startup based in Athens, has just launched Quencher, an autonomous amphibious aircraft currently in what the company is describing as “the preliminary design phase.”

With a 4,500-litre water capacity, Quencher is designed to conduct high-frequency aerial firefighting operations both day and night. Marcos Aerospace says patent application covering the platform’s core innovations have been filed.

The company announcement describes Quencher as “a deep-tech aerial firefighting platform”.

“Quencher integrates AI-assisted navigation, automated mission management, autonomous flight controls, and swarm coordination capability. The aircraft is optimized for continuous scooping operations from seas and lakes, as well as rapid refilling at designated ground stations, enabling relentless, around-the-clock initial attack and wildfire suppression,” according to the media release.

“Quencher is not merely a new aircraft; it represents a paradigm shift and a new category in aerial firefighting,” said Marcos Caramalengos, aerospace engineer and founder of Marcos Aerospace.

The Marcos Aerospace website provides some more detail. One operator can coordinate up to five Quencher aircraft simultaneously. Maximum speed is 440km/h, cruise speed is 360 km/h, built around a Pratt and Whitney PW127 turboprop engine.

A clarification of its current status on the website shows the concept is still in its very early days: “Quencher is under development. The aircraft, systems, and operational concepts described on this site reflect the current design intent and program direction. Certification, testing, and operational deployment will follow applicable regulatory and safety requirements.”

Quencher is in Pre-Production Development Phase (2026–2029), which includes the design, engineering, and certification of the Quencher aircraft ahead of first production and commercial launch.

Marcos Aerospace says it is now open to strategic partnerships and discussions with civil protection authorities, industry stakeholders, and investors.

amphibious drone

Fire challenge unveils next wave of wildfire tools

Innovative projects that pair local communities with fire, technology and environmental industry experts have been announced as winners of the Fire Grand Challenge.

The Fire Grand Challenge is a competition to advance practical tools and approaches for wildfire mitigation, response, and landscape recovery. The organisers say the finalists were selected from a worldwide cohort of teams, with the winners sharing a $200,000 prize purse to support continued development.

The challenge only began in 2025 but received 92 technical applications and over 50 place-based community applications, from 20 countries represented in the teams. The final 12 teams advanced, each pairing a technical innovator with a local community partner, to validate solutions grounded in both leading-edge technology and place-based knowledge.
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Each finalist team received a $50,000 field-testing grant, and for nine months worked alongside land managers, fire experts, and local partners to demonstrate their solutions through controlled burns, flight trials, and rigorous technical assessments. Field tests were conducted in fire-prone landscapes, from the forests of British Columbia to the dry ecosystems of Chiapas, Mexico.

The winners are:

• Grand Prize Winner: Vibrant Planet Data Commons (Colorado, US) and the Kalispel Tribe of Indians (Washington, US). The winning team produced an AI-powered decision support tool to assist community planning for fire mitigation and restoration.

The tech was developed side-by-side with the local community, as Joel Adams of the Kalispel Tribe in Washington state explains.

“Fire is vital for fuels reduction, for bringing back some of our cultural resources. Fire has a huge role in managing land for the Kalispel tribe.”

“Utilising the outcomes and the story that will be told will allow not only myself but the Kalispel tribe to go for other grants, other funding opportunities. I see this as a way to kind of share our experience with other tribes in the northwest region and other regions across the nation.”

The winning teams for the Fire Grand Challenge 2025, Conservation X Labs. Photo: Drew Bird

• Runner-Up: International Savanna Fire Management Initiative (Victoria, Australia) and BIOMASA AC (Chiapas, MEX) – This team used a process called Emissions Reduction Traditional Fire Management (ERTFM), a system adopted from the work of Charles Darwin University researchers working with Indigenous groups in northern Australia. The system promotes early dry season burns, that are less destructive than late dry season fires. The team used geospatial information systems and local knowledge in the field in Mexico, in a model that is more financially sustainable that current practices and has the potential to generate income for local communities through carbon abatement schemes.

• Runner-Up: Flash Forest Inc. (Ontario, Canada) & Grand County Wildfire Council (Colorado, USA) – Forest regeneration technology guided by AI software that uses drones to distribute seed pods for replanting. Five years after the East Troublesome Fire in Colorado, the community expected to see young trees and seedlings – but in parts of Grand County, they were surprised to find little to no natural regeneration. This team field tested post-wildfire reforestation at a large scale, using technology – including drones – to help restore burned landscapes and improve wildfire resilience by planting for biodiversity and more fire-resistant species.

The Fire Grand Challenge has partners including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Esri, and Planet, among others.

For more information about the Fire Grand Challenge and the winning teams, visit www.conservationxlabs.com.

Wildfire technology

Big-tech companies pool their strengths for wildfire innovations

Four industry heavyweights will combine resources in a $100 million push for advance early detection and coordinated response to wildfires.

Lockheed Martin, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Salesforce and Wells Fargo have formed a joint venture in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and other technologies “to detect, prevent and fight wildfires”.

The announcement of the new venture – Emberpoint – is short on specifics on how the $100 million will be spent or how and where the outputs will be used, but says “agencies and utilities will gain access to proven, state-of-the-art systems without the burden of development costs, enabling communities to benefit from advanced, affordable wildfire prevention.”

This venture is one of many similar initiatives currently active around the world, and it not entirely clear how much is being done in cooperation and how much in competition.

Lockheed Martin and PG&E, for example, are already supporters of the XPRIZE Wildfire, which last week announced its five finalist teams in the Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, an $11 million global competition for teams developing innovative wildfire technology.

The venture has a strong US focus, but given the corporate reach of the four partners, the potential benefits could flow beyond those borders into other wildfire regions.

“It’s time to change the way we think about wildfires and bring the best of American technology and know-how to this growing threat to lives and property. Devastating wildfires are on the rise and this new partnership brings four leading companies in the aerospace, electrical power, tech, and financial industries together to address this national problem,” said Lockheed Martin Chairman, President and CEO Jim Taiclet.

“Building on Lockheed Martin’s leading-edge capabilities in space and ground-based sensing systems, autonomous air and land drones, and command and control systems, EMBERPOINT™ aims to combine these skills along with those of our partners to address what is a true national security mission.”

Taiclet was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying Emberpoint had $100 million committed to the venture from partners.

Other partners were more definitive in the scope.

“This partnership underscores our commitment to ending catastrophic wildfires,” said PG&E Corporation CEO, Patti Poppe.

“We plan to seek regulatory approval to pair Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s on-the-ground experience with our partners’ advanced technology, and properly scale how we identify risk, prevent incidents, and protect the people and ecosystems we serve for the benefit of all society—while staying fully focused on providing safe and reliable energy to our customers. Today’s announcement marks the next step in a broader, multi-phase effort to end catastrophic wildfires.”

Lockheed Martin is a global defense technology company with a significant involvement in wildfire work, particularly with its Sikorsky aerial firefighting aircraft (BlackHawk, FireHawk) and its ongoing development of an autonomous helicopter as part of the Rain.aero venture. It is headquartered in Maryland but claims 350 facilities across the US and worldwide.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation based in Oakland, California, has 16 million customers in north and central California. It will bring “deep wildfire mitigation experience, with proven layers of protection and a track record of deploying effective risk management programs across geographically-diverse communities.”

San Francisco based software company Salesforce will contribute its skills in “integrating disparate data streams into a unified, real-time response engine” using the power of its messaging app Slack and its AI building platform Agentforce.

Wells Fargo, the US-based multinational financial services company, is helping to fund the venture through a capital investment.

Quest for ‘Holy Grail’ of wildland firefighting safety awarded NASA contract

For a decade before Wildfire Today Founder and wildland firefighting stalwart Bill Gabbert’s death, he wrote numerous articles on what he called the “Holy Grail of wildland firefighting safety.”

Gabbert described this Grail as a system that could track the real-time location of firefighters and the wildfire they were fighting. The data should then be available in real time to key supervisors and decision makers involved in the operations and planning sections of wildfire response.

“It can save lives. There is no acceptable excuse for not getting this done,” Gabbert said in a 2019 article, explaining his “Holy Grail” definition. “The five federal land management agencies and the states with significant numbers of wildland firefighters need to implement a Holy Grail system as soon as possible … Government officials who drag their feet on this should have trouble sleeping at night.”

A company claimed to Wildfire Today that it is closer to making this quest a reality. RoGO Communications, which focuses on developing safety technology for firefighters and first responders, was recently awarded a NASA Small Business Innovation Research contract to develop its “DropBlock 2.0.”

The tool, which is about as big as three smartphones stacked on top of each other, would enable all deployed personnel to see near-real-time GPS locations for all firefighters and fire assets, such as bulldozers, water tenders, fire engines, high-value structures, medical evacuation and rescue sites, and makeshift water resources, along with the fire’s current location.

DropBlock would also share hyper-local fire weather information, including wind speed, direction, temperature, humidity, and other sensor data. RoGO also plans to release a mobile phone app in early 2026 that enables point-to-point communications among DropBlocks and crews, and plans to expand support to other first responders for hurricanes, earthquakes and floods.

DropBlocks went through Phase I, or discovery, portion of the NASA contract in the third quarter of 2024. The technology is now in Phase II, or the building phase, and will continue in that phase over the next two years, RoGO told Wildfire Today. Afterwards, it will go into the third and final phase to commercialize it within the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. RoGO CEO Rod Goossen also told Wildfire Today he is speaking with partners in Canada, Australia, and other U.S. allied nations for the possible deployment of DropBlock there.

RoGO formed after Arizona’s 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which became the sixth deadliest firefighting disaster in United States history after it killed 19 firefighters. The tragedy and the five firefighters who died in the Esperanza Fire also caused Gabbert to begin speaking about the Grail.

“All of this technology exists. It would be expensive to implement, but it could save lives,” Gabbert said in 2013.