The Mission
The Problem
Across the globe, wildfires are getting worse every year as climate change accelerates. Communities face increasing risk and people deserve free tools to understand their exposure. Many similar tools exist but they are accessible only to insurance companies. Allowing insurers to hold information hostage that could predict whether someone's house burns down, or whether they survive, is wrong.
The Approach
Prefire combines satellite imagery, building footprint data, and a short questionnaire to produce a personalized compliance estimate based on California's fire-safe regulations. Try the analyzer →
Contradictions
AI and cloud services are known contributors to climate change. Prefire's analyzer is not the kind of large language model most people associate with AI. This site uses a relatively low-impact machine learning model small enough to run on an iPhone. I hope to move away from commercial cloud services toward servers I control directly, but in the meantime I believe the benefit to users outweighs the cloud cost.
Limitations
Prefire generates no revenue, so it depends entirely on data released publicly by the USDA, USGS, CAL FIRE, and other state and federal agencies. Privately acquired satellite imagery is out of reach financially, so the tool uses what is available. The analyzer now works for properties anywhere in the U.S., but hosting the site, the analyzer, and the large geospatial datasets involved carries a real cost. I am actively pursuing grant funding to improve coverage quality and keep the tool free.