Los Alamos County has entered into a seven-year contract with BurnBot, a California -based company, to clear fuel from the forest with two high-tech tools: a remote-controlled masticator that chews up the fuel and the company’s eponymous “BurnBot,” a vehicle that conducts prescribed burns in a chamber, then suppresses them — leaving behind a blackline, intended to prevent fires from spreading.
On Tuesday, the company was running two masticators across from the Los Alamos Airport near Canyon Rim Trail. New Mexico State Forestry employees and members of a fire crew from Sandoval County traveled to Los Alamos to see the tech in action.
The area was selected to limit the impact of wildfire on the airport — and the road, N.M. 502, is one of the routes out of town, said acting wildland division chief Van Leimer.
A cloud of dust swirled around the two masticators, dubbed Wall-E and Johnny-5, as they rolled over the landscape, controlled by two BurnBot operators and overseen by foreman Luis Sotto.
One of the remote-controlled machines toppled a small tree and chewed it up with carbide teeth, spitting out wood chips and leaving a small, frayed rope of a trunk behind.
The masticators can handle terrain of 40 degrees or slightly more, and are designed to cause minimal soil compaction.
“You can run them on slopes that you can never run a conventional masticator,” Sotto said.
The tech isn’t a perfect solution, said Cody Chiverton, BurnBot’s fire and fuels operations leader, and fire crews will always be needed. Hand cutting is sometimes needed ahead of running Wall-E and Johnny-5.
“There’s [still] a lot of manual labor,” Chiverton said. “It’s a tool in a toolbox, and that’s really what tech is. Even when you look at drones, when they came into fire, they don’t solve every problem. But they’re a nice tool to have for certain areas.”
Chiverton, a former firefighter based in Oregon, spent about a decade with the Forest Service before moving to BurnBot. He said the company would like to eventually establish a base in New Mexico and hire local staff to operate the machinery.
The contract with Los Alamos County is priced per acre, with cost varying by terrain and difficulty. In Los Alamos, the cost is expected to range between $1,800 and $2,500 per acre. Leimer said about 50 acres are expected to be treated in the county this year.
The department has a mitigation budget. But Leimer said in recent years, the amount of mitigation work the department has actually been able to complete has been low as firefighters have had to focus on actively fighting fires rather than preventing them.
The main appeal of BurnBot is the speed, Leimer said. The two machines are able to treat about 3 acres in a day — a task, Leimer said, that would take a 20-person crew around double the time since they have to cut the fuel, then return to chip it.
“Prevention is not an emergency, but it is a marathon,” Chiverton said. “You have to shift to playing a long game.”
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