Citizen Fire

From simulation to shared sight

SimTable proved that people learn fire by seeing it move across terrain they know. 300+ SimTables deployed. CAL FIRE. Texas A&M Forest Service. Australian RFS. Used for crew training, community engagement, evacuation planning. Now we're building what comes next.

## The Gap We're Closing **Paradise, California. November 8, 2018.** Phones worked. Hundreds of citizens capturing photos and video. None of it fused. None of it reached the people routing evacuations. 85 dead. **Lahaina, Maui. August 8, 2023.** Phones worked. Citizens saw the fire reflash. They knew which roads were gridlocked. Those who followed official directions died in traffic. 102 dead. **Pacific Palisades, California. January 7, 2025.** Phones worked. Hundreds of thousands of photos and videos. Homes burning 40 minutes before the first evacuation order. Three fires. Same pattern. There is no ESRI in the first three hours. There are citizens with phones, crews with phones, and a growing network of ridgetop cameras. What's missing isn't sensors. It's fusion.

## What We're Building SimTable becomes a node in a larger network. The same interface crews train on—now showing fused real-time intelligence during an incident. - Citizens visit a URL. Browser handles camera access, GPS, peer connection. Zero friction. - Imagery stays on phones. When the network needs a specific frame, it pulls exactly those bytes. Serve what's requested. - Views triangulate across the network. Citizen imagery ties together with neighbor imagery, anchors against ridgetop cameras. - Privacy is architectural. Agents exchange geometric constraints, not raw footage.

## What Changes for Your Agency **Pre-incident:** Same community planning, crew training. Citizens learn their terrain. **During incident:** Those citizens become your sensing network. Real-time ground truth on the same terrain they learned in workshops. **Post-incident:** Playback reconstructed from citizen imagery. After-action review the community participates in. Citizens who've trained on your SimTable, who understand their risk, who contribute intelligence during incidents—that's a different relationship than sirens and evacuation orders.

## Good Fire Integration You're trying to return fire to landscapes that need it. A system that shows the full spectrum changes the conversation: > "Smoke visible from your location: Rx burn #2024-347, scheduled completion 5 PM. Beneficial fire. No action needed." Citizens who understand catastrophe and ceremony become a constituency for the fire management your landscape needs.

## The Acequia Model Your agency as mayordomo—coordinating the flow of fire intelligence across your community. Your citizens as parciantes—contributing what they see, receiving what they need to know. Not commanding your community. Coordinating with them. This model has legal standing. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize documenting how communities govern shared resources better than either markets or states.