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.

November 15 deadline for IAWF conference workshops

IAWF 7th fire behavior + fuels conferenceCall for Workshops at Boise — deadline is November 15

SEND YOUR PROPOSALS NOW:  Conference workshops will be scheduled for Monday, April 15 and Wednesday, April 17 at the 7th International Fire Behavior + Fuels Conference in Boise, Idaho.

Workshops provide a forum for researchers and other professionals working in wildland fire to discuss and exchange interests in fire. Conference workshops are an opportunity for technology transfer, ensuring that scientific and technological developments are accessible to a wider range of users who can use and develop them.

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Conference organizers are particularly interested in hosting technology-related workshops if you or your organization are working with new technology used in wildland fire, or using technology in new ways in fire. Workshops that were particularly well-received at previous conferences included one focused on Soil Moisture and Wildfire Prediction and another on Fire and Fuels Management Tools.

There will be a nominal registration fee for conference participants who attend workshops in April; this fee will cover the cost of meeting rooms, refreshments, and audio-visual equipment. Instructors will not be required to pay a fee.

The IAWF is now encouraging proposals for workshops. Please include in your proposal:

    • Workshop title
    • Names, affiliations, and emails of instructors
    • Short bio for each instructor, including qualifications related to the topic
    • Proposed duration (2, 4, 6 or 8 hours)
    • One-paragraph description of workshop
    • Minimum/maximum number of participants (if applicable)
    • Any special facility needs (e.g. LCD projector, computer lab, wifi)

7TH INTERNATIONAL FIRE BEHAVIOR + FUELS CONFERENCEEvaluation criteria include overall quality and the fit with respect to the conference topic: Fuel, fire and smoke: evolving to meet our climate challenge. 

The IAWF is interested in workshops that connect research and management. The workshops can also be used to discuss administrative techniques, challenges, and strategies, and may include roundtable brainstorming.

Deadline for proposals is November 15. Previous conferences are listed [HERE].

APPLY HERE

Questions? Contact Mikel Robinson at
execdir@iawfonline.org or (406)625-7059.

$11 million contest for innovation in fighting fire

Best-selling author and futurist Peter Diamandis became frustrated in recent years with the “craziness” of constant wildfire alerts he’d received. But unlike most people, Diamandis has a Rolodex full of wealthy benefactors and politicians, along with experience with a solution he had used before: Create a contest.

On April 21 his group XPRIZE launched its latest contest: finding new ideas to detect and suppress wildfires.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) said the prize threshold includes detecting and suppressing a high-risk wildfire in 10 minutes or less, and pinpointing from space all fire ignitions across multiple states or countries — in 60 seconds. These are the challenges for innovators in XPRIZE Wildfire, a four-year, $11 million competition to develop and demonstrate fully autonomous capabilities to find and fight wildfires.

XPRIZE Wildfire

The United Nations, the White House, and Congress recently have prioritized destructive wildfires as a major economic, environmental, and safety threat. Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E, said they are co-sponsoring the project. “Today’s launch of XPRIZE Wildfire is a call-to-action to entrepreneurs, roboticists, artificial-intelligence experts, scientists, and innovators from across the globe to revolutionize wildfire detection and suppression,” she said.

XPRIZE Wildfire encourages teams from around the world to innovate across firefighting technologies in two different tracks designed to transform how fires are detected and suppressed.

    • In the Autonomous Wildfire Response track, teams will need to monitor at least 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), and autonomously suppress a wildfire within 10 minutes of detection.
    • In the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence track, teams will have one minute to accurately detect all fires across a landscape larger than entire states or countries, and 10 minutes to precisely characterize and report data (with the fewest false positives) to two ground stations.

The day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Palmer Luckey, a 30-year-old founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company that sold for $2 billion, announced that he was forming the first team to compete for the prize. He said he cares more about solving the problem than winning the money, but he believes the cash will motivate other contestants to form teams and compete.

“I sold my last company for billions of dollars so I can do whatever I want,” he said. “We started working on wildfire tech because I think it’s very, very important. The money in this prize to me is honestly immaterial.” Luckey said at the contest launch that he thinks software, not hardware, will make the difference in detecting and containing fires.

The four-year contest is not winner-take-all. Teams will compete for top prizes of as much as $3.5 million and a bonus $1 million prize to develop technology that can detect fires both from the ground and from space, and fight them using drones or other autonomous vehicles. They’ll compete, for example, to see which technology can accurately detect fires across a land mass the size of a state or country in one minute or suppress fires using an autonomous vehicle within 10 minutes.

Andrea Santy, who is running the competition for XPrize, also said the prize money may not be the most important driver. Teams will benefit from multiple rounds of live testing and validation that would be hard to organize independently. The group is spending an additional $11 million beyond the prize money to run the contest, she said; some of that money will fund a documentary about the competition.

XPRIZE Wildfire is offered in partnership with Co-Sponsors PG&E and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Presenting Sponsor Minderoo Foundation, Bonus Prize Sponsor Lockheed Martin, Supporting Sponsor Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Benefactors Nichola Eliovits and Michael Antonov. Sixteen teams are already registered. For more information, to get involved, or to register a team to compete, visit the xprize.org/wildfire website.

Six new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters

Hearing about technology wildland fire
Hearing about technology for wildland fire, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee June 5, 2019.

This week the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing in Washington about new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters. The Committee invited companies to describe new systems that can help firefighters communicate and improve their situational awareness. Legislation signed by the President in March requires the federal land management agencies to adopt within 6 to 24 months systems that can track in real time both the advancing edge of a wildfire and all of the firefighting resources working on the incident. Firefighters have been killed when these important facts about a dangerous fire were not known, due to smoke, darkness, or terrain.

In the video below we see interviews with the representatives of six companies describing their systems that may improve the situational awareness of firefighters.

(The video can also be viewed at YouTube)

Only three of the 20 Senators that are members of the committee attended the hearing, Cory Gardner (CO), Maria Cantwell (WA), and Martin Heinrich (NM). Approximately 20 Senators sent one or more  members of their staff to observe.

In addition to the six companies that appear in the video, other organizations that had exhibits and made presentations in the hearing were the National Weather Service, Rave Mobile Safety, Vulcan Fire, and Simtable.