When fire nears home
Northern Arizonans are familiar with the threat of wildfire and become more so every year as the danger grows. When the flames neared her mother’s property during the Rafael Fire in Sycamore Canyon of 2021, Ariel Strong felt especially worried — and helpless.
Strong is a trained wildland firefighter, which made her painfully aware of wildfire’s tendency to run up canyons. She watched the news closely and imagined her 85-year-old mom having to load up her cats, dogs and birds, and evacuate. At the time, Strong was managing a data analytics team and felt powerless as she waited for updates.
“That’s when I really started thinking, ‘Data is great. I like data, it pays well, but I’m not really feeling the mission right now,’” Strong said.
She felt a call to return to her firefighting roots and dreamed of a way that she could apply her data skills. The fire stopped short of her mother’s property but the scare sparked a new passion for Strong.
Using emerging technology to build wildfire resilience
A month later, she bought her first drone. Soon after, she secured her drone pilot license and sold her property to support her business idea. Strong envisioned using drone technology and AI-assisted data analysis to offer precise risk assessments to property owners as well as empowering them with personal mitigation and evacuation plans. Over the next few years, Strong began scaling up her business.
The business she developed, FireFlight, was just awarded $10,000 as one of this year’s winners of the Innovate Waste Challenge, an annual carbon neutrality and water conservation competition held by the city of Flagstaff.
The competition is a collaboration between the city’s Economic Development and Sustainability departments and Moonshot, a nonprofit supporting Arizona’s entrepreneurs. Think of ABC’s Shark Tank but a little more friendly and focused on the environment and sustainability.
Weeks before the deadline, Strong considered the competition at the suggestion of her business mentor. She quickly assembled her application and hoped for the best.
“It actually turned out being a lot of fun,” Strong said.
Her competitors were encouraging and Strong found the process of refining her pitch exciting.
Now she’s ready to take on clients looking to make their properties more resilient to the increasing threat of wildfires.
‘A woman on a mission’ to protect and educate
Strong’s first call to firefighting came in the spring of 2002 when she saw a local news segment about a wildland firefighter preparing for the season ahead. She remembers being moved by the featured firefighter’s love of animals and desire to protect them.
“There was just something about the way he talked about it, how much he loved doing it, and then he was talking about the animals and I was like, ‘I gotta do that,’’’ Strong said.
As a kid, Strong dreamed of being a veterinarian and caring for animals. While her journey led her to computer programming and data analysis, her dream to help wildlife lived on.
She decided to fight wildfires. And when Strong finds a new interest, she dives deep. In the following years, she joined a fire science program at Coconino County Community College, she worked on hand crews and engine crews, became an EMT, trained as a Wildland Fire Training Specialist and pursued other certificates.
In 2006, she returned to working as a software engineer, but her interest in wildfire mitigation burned on.
Strong is 65 years old and as some of her peers may be eyeing retirement, she is excitedly entering what she calls her “third act.” After the Rafael Fire, she felt it was time to get involved with firefighting again. She felt working on prevention would be more sustainable than being on a crew again and was excited by the potential use of emerging drone and AI technologies.
“I’m a woman on a mission,” Strong said. “I got a fire lit under me.”
Strong is eyeing the uptick in property insurance prices nationwide, as well as the growing issue of insurers fleeing risky, fire-prone areas entirely, halting sales of policies and dropping existing clients. She hopes that insurers might soon be willing to understand fire-prone areas on a more granular level and take into account the mitigation steps homeowners make. One day, she wants FireFlight’s services to be a tool for homeowners bargaining with insurers. Strong wants to help clients document their particular risk levels and the steps they’ve taken to reduce them.
Offering clients peace of mind
Right now, she’s ready to offer clients peace of mind — reducing their fire risk by giving them practical steps. When the suggested tasks are too big for her clients to do by themselves, Strong hopes to connect her clients to local businesses that can help. She hopes to grow her business so it can provide a variety of stable, high-paying jobs in Flagstaff, including drone piloting and data analysis. Her “big vision” is to have crews that can serve clients in Northern Arizona and beyond.
As the number and size of wildfires grow, Strong believes we all have a role in preventing catastrophe. As fire prevention and wildland experts adjust and improve their practices, property owners have a responsibility to adjust too. But some property owners are reluctant to take on this responsibility, Strong says, perhaps out of an apathetic fatalism, or a desire to see other stakeholders take on the job, or a simple fear of high costs.
But Strong said a lot of what property owners can do to reduce the risk of fire on their property is simple and effective. She points to cleaning gutters, keeping woodpiles a distance from structures, raking pine needles, and planting the right kinds of plants.
“I’ve learned that a really big part of my job is to be an educator,” Strong said. The residents of fire-prone areas are in it together, she said.
“You can’t protect one house effectively in isolation, just like you can’t protect one tree in the forest in isolation,” Strong said. “We have a responsibility to keep our properties as safe as we can — for ourselves and for everybody else.”
Ariel’s Moonshot Pitch (2MB PDF)
