Did you know you can protect your home from wildfire, even with a water or power outage, and even if you’re not there?
Did you know it is wildfire embers that cause home loss?
With the results of this research, we will determine what you need to extinguish those embers, and save your home.
We’re a group of Whistler landowners, testing exactly how much water is needed, how far in advance of a wildfire water should be applied, and how often water must be reapplied during a multi-day fire. Our sprinkler system is built for real-world conditions - engineered for snow load, mindful of water restrictions, resilient during power outages, and dependable even when property owners are away. Custom designed by Dr. Rhonda Millikin (EchoTrack) and Prodigy.
We have a multidisciplinary science team (ecology, wildfire, horticulture, irrigation, soil biology, statistics, and infrastructure protection) who have overseen the statistical design, and custom-built the microclimate sensor stations, to quantify the risk mitigation under both wildfire and climate stressors.
(Table 1 - Analysis of Sensor Cost)
We expect the cost will be significantly less than the current approach of vegetation management under fuel thinning and FireSmart. You could help us collect the data to test our hypothesis.
If so, please email rmillikin@echotrack.com and provide your location and contact information.
Would you consider helping to fund our custom sensor stations so we can make this available to other communities in BC? For $2,000 you enable a full sensor system, with unique capability that allows us to optimize plant species, protect a property and generate open data for wildfire resilience.
With 10 systems this summer, we will produce the first microclimate-based wildfire dataset in BC, guiding policies across the province. Having data from this summer will strengthen our grant applications to distribute our learning more broadly.
(Figure 1 - Custom designed sprinkler system for snow load, water restrictions, a power outage, and out of town property owners.)
Comparison of custom sensor system to commercial availability for wildfire and climate mitigation
(Table 1 - Sensor Cost Analysis)
Dr. Rhonda L. Millikin,
On behalf of our landowners and scientific community.