First Blog Post - Forward Progress

We are in a rural area of Northern California, where the wildfire risk is extremely high. We are less than an hour from Paradise, where the deadliest California fire was last year. The only way for us to prevent this happening in our community is to start reducing the fuel loads at our homes. We have to remove brush and trees to prevent our community from burning in the future. All of this brush has to be cut, removed, and disposed of. Unfortunately, there is no easy, carbon friendly way to get rid of all the cut brush and wood. We currently take this fuel reduction waste at our school and convert it into useable wood products. 

Our InvenTeam grant is to develop a way to use the wood that we can not process and find a way to dispose of it in an easy, safe, and environmentally friendly way. We are currently working on a small scale incinerator to do just that.

Our visit with Leigh Estabrooks of Lemelson-MIT was very informative and also representative of the desperate need to solve this new fire crisis problem. When Leigh was here, we had no power because of a safety shut down by our electrical provider, PG and E. This fall we have had school nine days without power because of the fire risk.