When I caught up on my news reading over the long holiday weekend in the U.S., I felt like I should find shelter somewhere, or at least go back to bed, pull up the covers, and cover my head with a pillow.
It seems the hurricane season in the Atlantic is about to pick up again, after a quiet few weeks, and could produce a perilous September. Meanwhile, scientists said climate change could produce baseball-sized hail, as convective storms in the U.S. continue to get worse, and is causing a wave of damage and death from lightning strikes in India. And wildfires continue to rage, to the point that Allstate just got approval to raise homeowners insurance rates 34% in California.
Yikes.
But there were also glimmers of hope, at least on the wildfire front. As one article said, in a reference to Silicon Valley, "What happens if you set a region full of technology entrepreneurs and investors on fire? They start companies. Dozens of start-ups, backed by climate-minded investors with more than $200 million in capital, are developing technology designed to tackle a fundamental challenge of the warming world."
Some of those efforts seem to me to have real promise.
Let's have a look.
The New York Times article I quoted, which carries the clever headline, "Silicon Valley Wants to Fight Fires With Fire," describes two promising ideas, in particular.
The first, from Kodama Systems, is a way to accelerate the thinning of forests to reduce the amount of fuel that can ignite in a wildfire.
The article says:
"In 2022, the U.S. Forest Service set a target for 50 million acres to be treated — thinned, pruned or burned — on public and private lands over the next decade. In 2023, 4.3 million were treated, including two million acres of prescribed burning — and that was a record. To keep pace, treatment would need to grow by a third this year."
To help with that, Kodama is automating work done by skidders, which are massive machines with a bulldozer blade on the front and a grapple on the back that can grab and drag trees after they're cut or knocked down.
Currently, a driver operates a skidder from the cab for a 12-hour shift, but Kodama's AI handles enough of the work that a remote operator can run two skidders at the same time. The skidders also can operate in the dark, using lidar and other sensors to map their surroundings.
Having one person run two skidders at the same time, working around the clock, obviously improves the productivity of both the workers and the equipment. The ability to operate remotely is also key, given that it's hard to find enough people who want to do the hard, hot work of thinning forests. Kodama has operated skidders in the U.S. from London, so the remote operators wouldn't even have to work through the night; they can be many time zones away, working from the comforts of home during normal, daylight hours.
For now, any limbs and brush that can't be used for commercial purposes at a sawmill are piled up and burned, but Komada is experimenting with the possibility of burying it to keep carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere when the material is burned.
The other startup that really struck me in the TImes article is BurnBot, which is used to create firebreaks that can protect a community from a wildfire. This concept could be especially powerful because it won't just be used for routine maintenance, like Komada's thinning of forests, but could be used in an emergency if a fire breaks out nearby.
The Times describes the BurnBot as basically an upside-down propane grill. The device, which looks to me a bit like a Zamboni, trundles over the ground, incinerating everything beneath it in a five-foot-wide swath and then putting out the fire with water.
The article says:
"Alongside a highway, this protective line could prevent ignition caused by passing cars; checkerboarding a large stretch of land, it could allow for controlled burns that normally require dozens or hundreds of people and ideal weather conditions.
"The CalFire chief Jim McDougald, who works on fuel reduction efforts across the state, said firebreaks like these gave his firefighters time to protect the community of Shaver Lake during the rampaging 2020 Creek fire."
I can picture the work being done with the BurnBot because it's being tested near "the Dish," the giant satellite dish on a hilltop next to the Stanford campus. I used to cycle by it all the time when we lived in the area and can still see all the dead grass on the hillside that is there this time of year.
There has also been some good news about drones that can detect wildfires sooner than happens now. From last week, here is an article about swarms of drones that use "AI technology—incorporating thermal and optical imaging—... to automatically detect and investigate fires, and relay all the information to the fire team. Under the supervision of fire and rescue teams and using swarm technology,... the drones can then intelligently self-coordinate as first responders to rapidly deploy fire retardant onto the fire, monitor the situation and return to base."
The Times mentions some other startups that show promise for early detection: Pano, which sets up monitoring stations and uses AI to spot wildfires quickly; Overstory, which uses satellite and aerial imagery to help utilities reduce the risk that vegetation causes to their power lines; and Treeswift, which creates "digital twins" that let utilities model their environments and reduce the risk to their power lines. Rain uses autonomous helicopters to put out blazes.
None of these startups will help much in what figures to be a brutal September, as hurricane activity picks up in the Atlantic, as lightning lashes India, and as baseball-sized hail becomes more common. But maybe they can make a difference by a September or three from now.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. As long as I'm on the subject of drones, here are two video clips that show how ubiquitous and versatile they have become.
One is deadly serious. This clip shows a Ukrainian "dragon fire" drone setting ablaze a stand of trees that Russian soldiers are using to hide their emplacement.
The second is just a goof, from a clever person with too much time on his hands who decides to scare the pants off someone.