5 SEPTEMBER 21-27, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Steve Wolf’s house is perched in the foothills above Boulder, looking out over the city. From his deck, the view is parched — a few evergreens dotting a carpet of dying grass. Everything looks like kindling. The air is milky, it’s 100 degrees, and the earth has a baked shimmer. In other words, it’s perfect fi re weather. Wolf has been preparing for this heat and this moment for a decade, more like three decades. Inside his garage is what he calls a small “Hurricane on wheels,” the most high-tech fi refi ghting equipment yet invented. His timing for introducing it comes at a critical moment. Since 2020, Colorado has experienced three of its largest and most destructive wildfi res: the Cameron Peak fi re in Roo- sevelt National Forest, the East Trouble- some fi re in Arapaho National Forest, and Boulder County’s Marshall fi re. Nationally and internationally, the story is the same. Canada is burning, New York City was re- cently blanketed in smoke, and Maui is still smoldering after the deadliest fi re of the last century, killing around 100 people. The globe is getting hotter and wildfi res are increasing across the planet, consuming more lives, trees and structures and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. But Wolf has a vision and a plan. “Weather, particularly the wind, rules fi res,” he says, walking into his garage and putting his hand on a Hurricane prototype known as CloudBurst, a self-contained fi re- suppression system that can be dropped into any pickup truck and deployed immediately. “You own the wind, you own the fi re.” A four-foot-by-six-foot machine on a mo- bile platform, CloudBurst has a Honda pump in the body and a small jet engine on top; other parts came from Home Depot or Amazon. The CloudBurst costs under $100,000, weighs 400 pounds, holds 200 gallons of water, and is run by a hand-held remote control. Press- ing buttons that make the equipment move, Wolf looks like a man fl ying a model airplane or manipulating a robot. “If weather rules the fi re,” he says, start- ing up the CloudBurst, “we have to rule the weather.” But how? GETT Y IMAGES/MILEHIGHTRAVELER continued on page 6
