FireWatch started with the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. I watched entire neighborhoods burn — the Palisades, Altadena, Eaton — and kept coming back to the same thought: every one of those fires was catastrophic by the time it could really be fought, but every one of them started small. Somewhere in those first minutes and hours there was a window to catch it and hold it, and nothing existed to act inside that window. There could have been a solution. Nobody had built it. So I decided to.
I built the first version of the system myself — the drone hardware, the thermal sensing, the radio link, and the ground station dashboard — to find out whether cheap, off-the-shelf components could detect a fire earlier than the tools agencies rely on today. They could.
But the deeper problem isn't only detection — it's the gap between the first spark and the first resources on the fire. In remote terrain, water and crews can be hours away, and wildfires grow exponentially in that time. FireWatch is built to close that gap in three layers: fire watch towers that scan for smoke, a mothership drone that flies out to confirm and map the fire, and a swarm of payload gliders that keep it small until responders arrive with heavier resources.
Right now I'm focused on Phase 1 — the mothership drone that can fly to a suspected ignition, confirm it with onboard thermal and AI, and report its exact location back to the people who can act on it. FireWatch is still early: self-funded, pre-revenue, and a solo effort today. This site documents that progress honestly, and starts the conversations — with fire agencies, government partners, and eventually a team — that turn a working prototype into something deployed in the field.
The LA fires — the idea
Watching the Palisades and Eaton fires, I became convinced the first hour of a wildfire was a solvable problem no one was solving — and started designing FireWatch.
Prototype validated
Working drone + ground station: live thermal streaming over a private radio link, with real-time alerting — proof that early autonomous detection works.
Phase 1 — the mothership
Building the drone that flies to a suspected ignition, confirms the fire with onboard thermal and AI, and relays its exact location to the crews who can respond.
Towers & containment
Autonomous detection towers that dispatch the mothership on their own, and the glider swarm that contains fires until responders arrive — plus the first conversations with fire agencies and government partners.