Are wildfires not an engineering problem?
California is YC's backyard. PG and friends all have their lives in Nor Cal where most of these recent fires have been taking place.
I am perplexed by the silence of YC and other bay area stars like Google, Apple and the bay area tech giants that seem oddly silent on the matter.
Would it take Google or Apple's campus burning down before they took the threat seriously?
But from the best and brightest in the world? People who put rovers on Mars but don't want to put a fire out that could destroy half of their state?
Then again, I’m thinking of a pine forest in a temperate climate, in which a fire of this kind doesn’t really harm the mature trees much. I think some other types just burn out instead and have a succession of ecosystems that restores the resulting patch from the literal (extremely fertile) ashes over the course of several decades. I’ve no idea where a California forest ranks on this scale, and while a forest may be completely fine with letting many square kilometres be completely razed and then heal over the course of a couple of centuries, as long as it happens rarely enough, humans will be understandably miffed.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that clearing and maintaining a forest is extremely hard work. I have about 4 acres of forest on my property and 3 years in I still haven't fully cleared all of the dead trees and branches. Granted it's not my full time job, but I would estimate that a single person is capable of maintaining tens to maybe hundreds of acres per year. That implies that preventing fires via full suppression + fuels reduction would require hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers to be effective.
But there’s partly a question of involvement here: if you don’t meddle in the forest and don’t care to make it friendly to humans, it will (barring climate shifts that I’m in no way qualified to talk about) mostly take care of itself. It’s when you start allowing people inside and/or putting out small fires that you start having problems. So if you don’t have the necessary manpower, maybe don’t do that? Either take responsibility or leave it alone. You will still need firebreaks and people to walk them separating the two parts, though.
(Although given how much forest there is in the US compared in Europe, it would be foolish to expect to get by with a comparable amount of people, and a hundred thousand rangers, while undeniably very expensive and a lot of effort, does not fundamentally look like an unreasonable figure.)
Most houses will need 100 to 200 feet of cleared vegetation around them. Instead we love the look of large pine trees and brush right against our homes. The term is 'built to burn'
No, they're 90% a political problem.
It's politics that dictates whether we have a workable schedule of controlled burns.
It's politics that dictates whether electrical cables get buried.
It's politics that dictates whether you can build new homes in wildfire-prone areas.
It's politics that dictates whether those new homes get electricity without paying the costs of burying the supply cables needed.
It's politics that dictate how many firefighters we're willing to pay for, and what equipment they have.
And it's politics that dictates whether idiots can get their hands on explosives for gender reveal parties.
Oh, there are some contributions that could be made with engineering - lower cost ways of burying cables, for example - but I doubt the adtech companies have any special expertise there.
Then Yes.
If SpaceX had this line of thinking a decade ago then Space tech would not be where it is today.
https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...
For the executive summary, look here:
https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/242/Execut...
California is big, the state itself controls a fraction of land, so there's a coordination problem with private and federal parties. Prescribed burns can actually be a tough sell. Resources are an issue in every corner. Known positive policies don't proceed apace because these are unsolved political problems.
Solution is not government as with the Space race. It will be won by private industry. I'm perplexed that more bay areas thought leaders haven't jumped on this problem given how close it is to their back yards.
It's plausible that you could see some private solutions to accomplishing known goals, and see those sold to the government. But that leaves the resourcing problem, which is why some known policies aren't already being implemented in the first place.
Could private landowners invest in this themselves? Maybe, but it has the same incentive/risk-management problems that are the reason most people rely on public fire departments.
The solution is one that would scale up to big fires but handle the small ones first.
If I had a solution to put out a 20 acre brush fire near my house in under an hour I would not be waiting for the fire trucks to arrive
And some of the most important tech is stuff that’s fairly iterative. It’s things like better modeling fire behavior, enabling pilots to fly in mountainous terrain in the dark, detecting fires earlier, etc.
I don't understand. Do you mean to say they are ok with half of the state burning down as long as their offices are unaffected?
Air quality will affect the output of their workforce. They can probably measure it in dollars.
Better offense is needed. Yes it's good to understand fire dynamics but not very useful when nothing can be done about it.
I was hoping we'd figure out a better way by now than throwing more firefighting humans at the problem.
Thiel and Page have bought New Zealand residency, so maybe thr billionaires have sorted a solution? It does rain an awful lot down here.
But where are the DIY fire fighting apps and devices? Where are the startups that promise 10,000 drones that can put out a 50,000 acre fire in under 2 hours?
And there is otherwise not much money to be made in firefighting tech.
That's about it.
Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?
Apparently!
> Not much money to be made by saving lives and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?
No, there's not. Where would the money come from? The public? Good luck with that.
I think you are confusing the money that can be lost due to damage from a fire being a large number compared to the amount of money available to spend on fire fighting itself. A private company in business to make money does not care about the money saved from things not being damaged. Insurance companies have an interest in that.
The only way for fire tech to make money would be to come up with an extremely vile scheme to ensure people used their services. Fire tech could extort insurance companies/private owners a percentage of their property's value in order to save their home from the fires. You'd then see door to door sales people using phrases like "it'd be a shame if something were to happen to this lovely home of yours". Some distopian level of society where your house is actively worked to prevent it from burning, but you neighbors house is now a pile of burning embers because they weren't a member while the team working your house stands there and watches.
Space was government only until very recently.
If you actually had a solution in hand for even small scale fires that was effective and could scale you easily make this profitable. I'd be the first customer. I live in a fire prone area.
Fear sells.
So you're panacea of if they build it, they will come isn't as realistic as you are hoping.
Edit: Also, you'd better have one hell of a legal team to draft up some BS ToS to protect from when ultimately your firefighting efforts fail. One lost property, and your valuation drops to 0.
Our collective heart is in the right place. I have my own plans to do something about it but I am not in the same position as say Elon Musk for example. Not yet anyway ;)
I am in tech however. And I believe passionately that tech can solve this problem. Even if it is just a symptom of global climate change.
I think we must start solving these problems fast and with novel approaches. The same old tired routine isn't working. We've kicked the can enough down the road with government and fire prevention. New ideas and methods are needed and needed fast.
We've had very good idea of how houses burn for 30+ years and we keep designing things that are built to burn.
I guess we will find out if private industry can solve it.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/...