The BetaKit Guide: Wildfire
As Senior Research Officer for the BC Wildfire Service, Natasha Broznitsky regularly meets with startups pitching high-tech solutions—from AI risk models to drone surveillance, water-delivery systems, nuanced GIS mapping, and wearable devices.
BC Wildfire already uses plenty of tech, including infrared scanning, night vision capabilities, and sophisticated software platforms. The team is currently field testing low-cost 5G-capable IoT weather sensors, developed in partnership with the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
“It is a dynamic space to work in and patience is appreciated.”
Natasha Broznitsky, BC Wildfire Service
But according to Broznitsky and other potential buyers of wildfire technology, innovators in this space often fail to see the forest from the trees.
Many ideas are developed without the right access to operational context, leading to solutions that aren’t feasible in real-world conditions.
Seasonal R&D
The good news is: wildfire agencies are open to innovation, and startups are starting to show up.
Sarah Goodman, CEO of NorthX Climate Tech, formerly the BC Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE), encourages companies developing wildfire tech to understand that the path to deployment is slow, messy, and seasonal. This can be an uncomfortable shift from the typical “move fast, break things” mindset.
“Because the wildfire season is getting so much longer, wildfire services across the country and globally have less time to test and pilot new innovations,” Goodman said. “If you’re a startup and you’re used to working on a really fast cycle, you need to exercise some patience because your key customer may be a government agency that is already stretched very thin.”
Selling wildfire tech is not for the faint of heart. Buyers of wildfire technology face immense pressures, limited budgets, and unforgiving operational environments. What works in one region may fall flat in another. A promising solution in a pilot program can buckle under the weight of real-world constraints, whether it’s terrain, staffing, policy, or inter-agency compatibility.
“There really is a need to conduct a deep level of research to fully understand the problem in specific areas—both in terms of what you can offer and how that fits within existing operating conditions,” Goodman said.
BC Wildfire Service, for example, does not have a funding structure for ideas, and requires companies to have their own sources of early-stage funding.
The agency also assesses potential wildfire management solutions through the lens of its four operational pillars: preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery. Tech solutions should enhance safety or effectiveness in at least one of these areas, while acknowledging their interconnectedness.
Startups can also expect a rigorous and methodical evaluation process, with trials involving the appropriate geography and internal testers with specific operational experience and expertise.
These trials can often be delayed by the on-the-ground realities of seasonal wildfires. A busy wildfire season can be good for data collection but also challenging because there is so much demand on crews. A slow season means more opportunity to engage in a trial, but not as much opportunity for data collection.
“It is a dynamic space to work in and patience is appreciated,” said Broznitsky.
Great tech, wrong terrain
Over the past few years, wildfires have devastated regions of North America, South America, Europe, and Australia, and global buyers of wildfire technology are actively comparing notes.
BC Wildfire maintains a particularly strong relationship with its California-based counterpart, Cal Fire, which played a key role in responding to the devastating Los Angeles fires in January.
For the past two years, BC Wildfire has been running trials with a predictive fire-growth modelling software, known as Tactical Analyst, they first heard about from Cal Fire.
But Broznitsky says wildfire technology rarely scales seamlessly across geographies.
“You can’t necessarily take something that works in California and just insert it into BC,” she said.
Each region susceptible to wildfire has its own topography, fuel types, and atmospheric conditions. Meaning a solution that works in one place won’t always be successful in another.
But, she noted, collaboration across borders is essential to addressing this global threat.
“It’s going to take a whole society approach to effectively address the challenge of wildfires,” she said.
Within this context, Broznitsky remains optimistic about technology’s contribution to the wildfire battle, despite the challenges of scale.
“If you were to imagine fire suppression 50 years ago, the growth in the technology we have seen has been huge,” she said. “We really appreciate when companies have an idea that they come and talk to us about early on. It’s been really encouraging.”
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All photos provided by BC Wildfire Service.