She watched a wildfire destroy her town, so she’s building fire-proof bunkers

26 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleSheila Flynn

Fort/submitted photo

Linda Cantey had the sound of her mobile turned off the night the Atlas Wildfire weaved a path of destruction through her section of Napa, California.

“We were sound asleep when that thing came ripping through our neighbourhood,” recalls Cantey, an aerospace engineer and consultant based in northern California.

“By the time somebody called our home phone and woke us up… the entire canyon was full of flames, and we could see across the canyon that every single house over there was already on fire.”

She and her husband luckily got out, but one elderly couple on their street did not. The couple were up and ready to drive out their garage, but the power failed – and they didn’t know how else to open the door to escape.

Hundreds of other homes and structures were destroyed by that fire, which erupted in October 2017, ultimately burning more than 51,000 acres, destroying 783 structures and taking six lives.

Cantey’s voice still catches with emotion as she recalls that frightening time and devastating toll. But she’s channelled that trauma and grief into action.

In addition to joining local fire safety advisory boards, Cantey reached out to a mining company she consults for, which specialises in underground refuge chambers. She asked whether they could use their technology and know-how to engineer something that could similarly save lives in the event of wildfire flames.

The resulting above-ground refuge launched last month. Called Fort, it is a shed-like bunker with fire-proof doors and materials built to hold up to eight people and valuables with breathable air for four hours.

“If it wasn’t for Linda, we wouldn’t have built this, I don’t think,” says Josh Behling, president of Wildfire Safety Systems and one of the inventors of the Fort.

Fort is just one of several new businesses – from high-tech hydraulic homes to grass-clearing goats – to emerge as wildfires continue to worsen.

On its website, Nasa notes that extreme wildfire activity has doubled over the past two decades. Just this month, the Sandy Fire in California’s Simi Valley, about 30 miles (48km) north-west of Los Angeles, sparked widespread evacuation orders and burned more than 2,000 acres.

None of these solutions are cheap. On the low end, a herd of goats can cost upwards of $3,000 (£2,230) a day to clear a field. The Fort bunker starts at $60,000. Other companies offer flame-retardant home wraps and innovative sprinkler systems, which can cost thousands of dollars.

The night before Fort’s April launch, a pair of entrepreneurs appeared on US reality TV programme Shark Tank to pitch their own unique solution: HiberTec Homes, built on hydraulics that can disappear underground in minutes. The company said a 1,000 sq ft (93 sq m) home would cost approximately $1.2m.

With a background in real estate and construction, Holden Forrest said he came up with the hydraulic-homes idea in 2019, right after the Woolsey fire, which wiped out 1,200 homes near his home in Malibu, also in California.

He sketched an idea on the back of his nine-year-old daughter’s homework, he says, and soon showed it to an architect, partly expecting him to “laugh me out of the room”.

Instead, that led to a years-long effort with engineers and other experts to develop their patented technology.

Fort / submitted photo

Neither the Fort nor HiberTec will be saving anyone en masse immediately. Forrest reckons the first hydraulic home will be available by 2030. Behling says there are currently two show units of the Fort, and they’re anticipating about 150 orders per year initially, with the refuges manufactured at a Utah facility and shipped around five weeks after orders are received.

The Fort is meant to be a last resort; no one is advising residents to stay put as flames approach. But in the event people can’t escape, Cantey and the Fort team are hoping the “shed that sits in your backyard” will save lives.

She and the Fort CEO even volunteered to sit within the structure as it was tested in real fire – with firefighters on standby.

Other proposed solutions to wildfires are more low-tech.

In Colorado, Kimberly Jones has grown her herd of goats from 25 to 250 in seven years, deploying their efficient teeth, hooves and stomachs to clear undergrowth to stem the spread of flames.

Even as her business – Goat Mowers LLC – has grown steadily, she still saw “an uptick” in calls and new customers this year “with how dry it’s been”.

“They’re afraid,” she says of homeowners. “They’re really afraid.”

Last year, she says, a wildfire swept through 17 days after her goats cleared a residence – and the flames stopped 100 yards from where the goats had done their work.

Another goat company, Blue Tent Farms, has also seen demand rise in its home state of California. Managing partner Tim Arrowsmith has grown his California herd from 10 to 5,000 goats, serving clients from the Forest Service, to homeowners associations, to Pacific Gas & Electric.

Arrowsmith’s fire mitigation business, Western Grazers, caters mostly to large-acreage clients – but he’s noticed how recent disasters and growing awareness of the role goats can play in fire mitigation have piqued more interest from individuals, too.

“The minute the grass begins to turn, I get requests, probably 10 a week, from homeowners,” he says.

Goat Mowers LLC / Submitted photo

Each company knows they’re looking not just at profits but also at imperiled property and people.

“It’s become now a mission, and I think that it’s why I was put on the planet,” says Forrest, who adds that he sold his house and all possessions in pursuit of making HiberTec Homes a reality.

“I just thought: ‘We’ve got to come up with a solution. We have to.’ So now it’s just become this mission.”

For Linda Cantey, helping innovate to save people and possessions has helped her own healing.

“It’s therapy for all of us, because what we’ve witnessed, and what we’ve experienced, we wouldn’t want anybody else to go through. But it’s going to keep happening.”

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