Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a podcast that explores resilience & grit, generosity & kindness. We start with true stories of kindness and support during and after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Shared Ground
Episode 21: Quick Hits - Bridging Technology Gaps with Chris Anthony
Chris Anthony spent his career with CAL FIRE, finishing as Chief Deputy Director. Now he’s focused on a critical question: how do we connect innovation with the needs of firefighters and communities?
Sean spent time with Chris during a recent conference that SidePorch helped run focused on a resilient rebuild following the LA Fires.
In this conversation, Chris shares:
✨ Why the biggest gaps are not technical but in procurement, legislation, and communication
✨ Military models that show how to move ideas from concept to scale
✨ Innovations giving him hope:
- 🚁 Rain and autonomous Blackhawk helicopters
- 🌱 BurnBot scaling prescribed fire for resilient landscapes
- 🏡 Fireside helping residents harden homes and track risk reduction
- 🧪 Research like Burn Pro 3D and Agni-Nar shaping fire behavior models
Chris’s vision: technology that not only fights fires faster, but helps communities live with fire, through prevention, planning, and resilience.
👉 Listen now and join the conversation: How can innovation reshape our relationship with wildfire?
💬 Share your thoughts in the comments or forward this to someone working at the intersection of technology, policy, and community resilience.
Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.
For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.
Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).
Thanks for joining me today. Would you mind introducing yourself and letting us know what you're doing for a living?
Chris Anthony:Hi, Sean, so my name is Chris Anthony and my career was with CAL FIRE, where my last position was as the Chief Deputy Director of the department. And you know, following my career with CAL FIRE, there were a couple different areas that I really wanted to focus on, primarily around returning good fire to our landscapes and community risk reduction, the policy and legislative framework that we need to have in place. But one of the surprises for me was really thinking about how we connect innovation and technology to the fire service and the wildfire community, given its massive potential to accelerate our work and innovate our industry. And right now there are some gaps there in terms of how that connects. But thankfully there's some examples of how that can work, and a lot of those examples actually come out of the military, with programs like the Defense Innovation Unit, what you see in the Air Force with AFWERX, the Army with Army Futures Command, what you see in the Air Force with AFWERX, the Army with Army Futures Command no-transcript.
Chris Anthony:Can you talk about? What are the gaps that you're seeing, chris? Yeah, so a lot of the gaps are really in the form of one just simply connecting the technologist with the end user, and once we solve that problem, then it's a matter of how we actually implement pilots that can scale. We actually implement pilots that can scale, but that also involves a legislative pathway and also a procurement pathway that we don't have in place as well. Being able to move technology from very early phases to maturity and having a way of doing that in a way that you don't have to send a technologist or a company back through multiple requests for proposal processes, will help that company be more successful, but also it'll help the end user inform what that technology needs to look like to ultimately meet the end user or the firefighter's needs in that perspective.
Sean Knierim:So, Chris, as you're thinking about the different types of innovation that you're running into and advising or seeing out in the space, can you give a few examples of the ones that are giving you hope or getting you excited that we might be able to address some of these gaps?
Chris Anthony:Sure so, and I think it's important that everyone sees themselves in the innovation space. So, whether or not you're looking at landscape scale resiliency, community risk reduction, ignition reduction from things like utilities or fast fire suppression, I think it's easy to really focus on fast fire suppression, because that's where a lot of the dollars are in terms of suppression, but, as we know, we need to be focusing on the other side of the equation because, ultimately, what we want to have is communities that can withstand the impacts of wildfire or will be resilient to wildfire urban fire conflagrations. So some of the things that I'll just mention really briefly. Rain is a company of autonomous Blackhawk helicopters that can be both flown crude and uncrude, and it's a very promising technology really thinking about how we can use autonomy to increase the safety of the airspace and also support air operations in their current form. Another technology that I'm really excited about is BurnBot, and BurnBot both looks at not only the landscape in terms of the types of vegetation and fuels reduction that needs to happen within and around communities, but also really looking at how we scale prescribed fire in our ecosystems, because in California, most of our ecosystems are actually fire adapted. They had fire naturally running through them at very low intensity and severity, and good fire is actually the most effective tool that we have to achieve a resilient landscape and communities that are protected.
Chris Anthony:The other is Fireside, and Fireside works with fire agencies and has a really intuitive resident engagement platform that helps residents understand the kind of mitigations they need to do to drive down the risk, not only from a defensible space standpoint, but also from a home hardening standpoint.
Chris Anthony:And then they have an incredible data schema where they're able to really aggregate a lot of data which helps them understand how risk is being reduced throughout a community them understand how risk is being reduced throughout a community. But I'm going to also talk about some things in academia as well, not just on the private side, and that is UC San Diego is working on a prescribed fire three-dimensional fire modeling program called Burn Pro 3D, which is going to help practitioners scale good fire. And then Dr Hussam Mahmood out of Colorado State University has a model called the Agni Nar model, which is essentially a model that helps us understand how a fire is going to burn through a built environment and what that structure-to-structure ignition is going to look like, based on a specific ignition point, which then helps us understand the mitigations we need to take to be able to reduce that vulnerability of a community to take to be able to reduce that vulnerability of a community.
Sean Knierim:Thank you so much for sharing about all these different innovations that are coming through, and thanks for being with us today at this conference.
Chris Anthony:Absolutely. Thank you so much.