When fires are confirmed, Pano alerts fire monitoring agencies, providing them with images and location data that helps them respond quickly.
As firefighters battle the blaze, the company continues to provide up-to-date, highly zoomable images of changing conditions, along with satellite imagery, weather information and additional data sources collected from other sources.
Key indicators
- Industry: Forest fire detection
- Founded: 2020
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Notable fact: Pano is helping several agencies monitor and control flames that wildfire specialists intentionally light to clear brush and reduce risks in forests and grasslands, and is ready to send the alert if the fire breaks out beyond the limits designated.
Impact potential
The risks of devastating wildfires are increasing, in part because we continue to build communities on the edge of wildlands, many of which we have allowed to grow too large. Meanwhile, climate change is also making many areas hotter and drier, turning trees, shrubs and grasses into firewood.
As the economic and human cost of fires increases, it becomes increasingly critical to develop better ways to prevent or extinguish them before they become conflagrations.
Emergency services typically rely on people to detect smoke or fires and report them. But in the time it takes for agencies to verify those reports, small fires can grow into massive fires that become much more destructive and much more difficult to put out.
The promise of Pano is that it can dramatically shorten that response time by detecting, confirming and pinpointing the location of fires that might not be visible to humans for hours, because they are in remote areas or under tree cover, or ignite overnight. That should reduce the number of uncontrollable fires, as well as the deaths and damage they cause.
