Silicon Valley Wants to Fight Fires With Fire

This is the tinder box of the Sierra Nevada. It’s early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the air shimmers over dead trees choked in brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, past 20-foot-tall burn piles — tons of scrap wood not worth bringing to a sawmill. They’ve been assembled by workers on the front line of the fight against forest fires: a timber crew thinning these woods for the U.S. Forest Service and a tech start-up that’s trying to automate the enormous machines the crew relies on.

They are called skidders: 10-foot-tall vehicles, on four massive wheels, with a bulldozer-like blade on the front and a tree-size grapple dangling from the back. They are the worker bees, hauling downed logs from the forest to landing sites where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks bound for the sawmill. Usually, a single driver operates them for a 12-hour shift, grabbing logs from behind and then driving forward.

Engineers at the Sonora, Calif., start-up Kodama Systems, a forest management company, have hacked into a skidder built by John Deere, studded it with cameras and radar and plugged it into the internet. The result is a remote-controlled machine that does scut work for a timber crew and teaches itself to operate semiautonomously, using LiDar — or light detection and ranging — to map the forest.

Kodama has raised $12 million for a business that is driven by the reality that much of our forest land these days is stuffed with fuel just waiting to ignite. A few hundred miles from Stanislaus, a man drove a flaming car into a ditch in early August and started the Park Fire, which burned an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.