The Race to Build Megafire Prediction Tools

As firefighters work to put out the remainder of the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive in California history, blazes like it are becoming something even scarier: normal. Seven of the state’s 20 costliest fires have occurred in 2017 and 2018; last year, California spent $180 billion battling them. More than 1.7 million acres have burned this year, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, an area larger than the state of Delaware. Blazes bigger than 100,000 acres, once outliers, are now common enough that responders needed a term for them. They settled on “megafire.”

Given the urgency of the problem, the Golden State has become a testing ground for technology that aims to predict and combat such blazes, or even prevent them. Before first responders hit a fire’s front line, data analysts plot strategies in far-off labs and office parks, using software to arrive at “a better understanding of how fire responds to its environment and how it behaves,” says Rod Linn, a senior scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.