SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – The devastating 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires scorched more than 86,000 acres and destroyed nearly 1,500 structures in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Global wildfire competition
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The widespread destruction inspired a group of local firefighters and engineers to take action.
Ember Flash Aerospace, a small but ambitious startup, is competing in a worldwide competition to address wildfire detection and suppression.
“We’ve been working on this for two years to try to address the problems of wildfires that hit our community really hard,” said Zachary Ackemann, the company’s chief operations officer. “We all have family and friends who had homes burn. It’s hard to recover from that.”
$11 million prize on the line
Big picture view:
Formed by a mix of firefighters, coders, drone experts, and even a former NASA engineer, Ember Flash is now one of just 15 semifinalists in the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, a global contest seeking innovative solutions to combat increasingly destructive wildfires.
The winning team will receive $11 million in funding.
“Our technology is kind of spread into two pieces, the detection component and the suppression component,” said Ackemann.
The detection side relies on a compact camera-sensor device called Vigilant Detect, which uses AI and machine learning to spot smoke in real time.
The system can be mounted on homes, telephone poles, or anywhere with a clear line of sight. Multiple sensors triangulate the location of potential fires and relay the data to emergency responders, ideally while the flames are still small and manageable.
To demonstrate the technology’s effectiveness, the team staged simulated smoke events at several nearby locations in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Sunday. A team from the XPRIZE Wildfire competition was there to observe.
The second component of their approach is a drone system called Vigilant Raptor, which can launch itself based on the triangulated detection data.
“Once it locates that fire, it will fly to that location and actually put it out using something we call a suppression rod,” said Ackemann.
Andrea Santy, the program director of the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, watched the demonstration.
“It’s just so exciting,” said Santy. “To see where these teams have come in the past few years, and to know where they’re going, I find it really hopeful that we are going to have solutions that are going to end destructive wildfires.”
Ember Flash started as one of 150 teams in the competition. Five finalists are expected to be announced this winter.
