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She watched a wildfire destroy her town, so she's building fire-proof bunkers
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Sheila Flynn
Fort/submitted photo
Fort says the bunker can withstand flames and temperatures up to 2,000 F for three hours
Linda Cantey had the sound of her mobile turned off the night the Atlas Wildfire weaved a path of destruction through her section of Napa, California.
"We were sound asleep when that thing came ripping through our neighbourhood," recalls Cantey, an aerospace engineer and consultant based in northern California.
"By the time somebody called our home phone and woke us up… the entire canyon was full of flames, and we could see across the canyon that every single house over there was already on fire."
She and her husband luckily got out, but one elderly couple on their street did not. The couple were up and ready to drive out their garage, but the power failed - and they didn't know how else to open the door to escape.
Hundreds of other homes and structures were destroyed by that fire, which erupted in October 2017, ultimately burning more than 51,000 acres, destroying 783 structures and taking six lives.
Cantey's voice still catches with emotion as she recalls that frightening time and devastating toll. But she's channelled that trauma and grief into action.
In addition to joining local fire safety advisory boards, Cantey reached out to a mining company she consults for, which specialises in underground refuge chambers. She asked whether they could use their technology and know-how to engineer something that could similarly save lives in the event of wildfire flames.
The resulting above-ground refuge launched last month. Called Fort, it is a shed-like bunker with fire-proof doors and materials built to hold up to eight people and valuables with breathable air for four hours.
"If it wasn't for Linda, we wouldn't have built this, I don't think," says Josh Behling, president of Wildfire Safety Systems and one of the inventors of the Fort.
Fort is just one of several new businesses - from high-tech hydraulic homes to grass-clearing goats - to emerge as wildfires continue to worsen.
On its website, Nasa notes that extreme wildfire activity has doubled over the past two decades. Just this month, the Sandy Fire in California's Simi Valley, about 30 miles (48km) north-west of Los Angeles, sparked widespread evacuation orders and burned more than 2,000 acres.
Watch: Crews battle blaze as thousands evacuated near Los Angeles
None of these solutions are cheap. On the low end, a herd of goats can cost upwards of $3,000 (£2,230) a day to clear a field. The Fort bunker starts at $60,000. Other companies offer flame-retardant home wraps and innovative sprinkler systems, which can cost thousands of dollars.
The night before Fort's April launch, a pair of entrepreneurs appeared on US reality TV programme Shark Tank to pitch their own unique solution: HiberTec Homes, built on hydraulics that can disappear underground in minutes. The company said a 1,000 sq ft (93 sq m) home would cost approximately $1.2m.
With a background in real estate and construction, Holden Forrest said he came up with the hydraulic-homes idea in 2019, right after the Woolsey fire, which wiped out 1,200 homes near his home in Malibu, also in California.
He sketched an idea on the back of his nine-year-old daughter's homework, he says, and soon showed it to an architect, partly expecting him to "laugh me out of the room".
Instead, that led to a years-long effort with engineers and other experts to develop their patented technology.
Fort / submitted photo
The Fort bunker remains intact after testing it in...