To help put out wildfires quickly, a startup called Rain is equipping helicopters with software that lets them fly and drop water autonomously.
At 4 a.m. one morning when entrepreneur Maxwell Brodie was 11 years old, a lightning strike started a wildfire in a park near his home in British Columbia.
No one was able to get to it until several hours after sunrise, by which time it was the classic story: It was too late,” Brodie says. “The winds had picked up. By the time all was said and done, over 30,000 people were evacuated. I remember standing on our roof with my dad, nailing a hose to the cedar roof to leave the water dripping while a police officer was at the bottom of our driveway with a megaphone ordering us to leave. You couldn’t see 30 feet in front of your face because of the smoke.”
The family’s house survived, though many neighbors lost their homes. Brodie later moved to California to launch a software startup, but never forgot the fire. Then, when the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018, he decided to pivot to work on wildfire tech. He wanted to focus on a common problem: Even when a wildfire is detected quickly, firefighters sometimes can’t arrive soon enough to stop it.
His startup, Rain, makes software that gives autonomous helicopters the ability to respond to wildfires. Fire agencies could use the tech to put a network of helicopters in place in remote locations, ready to respond as soon as a fire is detected.
To read the full article: Meet the autonomous helicopter designed to stop wildfires