Amy Berry of the Tahoe Fund and Jesse Murray of NV Energy detail their groundbreaking public-private partnership that is creating a new model for community-wide wildfire resilience in Lake Tahoe. Discover how their "Smartest Forest Fund" is deploying innovative technology like the BurnBot remote masticator, using advanced conflagration modeling, and bringing insurance companies to the table to solve the WUI crisis at a neighborhood level.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
A Model Partnership: How a nonprofit (The Tahoe Fund) and a utility (NV Energy) are teaming up to accelerate mitigation.
The "Smartest Forest Fund": A "philanthropic venture capital" approach to de-risking and deploying new fire tech.
Enter the BurnBot: Using a remote-controlled masticator to clear hazardous fuel on steep slopes faster and safer than hand crews.
The Rise of "Urban Conflagration": Shifting the focus from defensible space to the critical need for home hardening.
Data-Driven Defense: How conflagration modeling can pinpoint the specific homes that need retrofits to protect an entire community.
Tackling the Insurance Crisis: Using hyper-local mitigation data to persuade insurance carriers to rewrite their risk models.
From Red Tape to Action: The challenges of environmental litigation and the need to move faster on forest health projects.
Wood as a Renewable Resource: Creating a local market for biomass by converting gas boilers to wood heat.
