French Fire victim works to create technology to help others who lose home
MARIPOSA — The French Fire in Mariposa quickly scorched through hundreds of acres, burning dangerously close to thousands of homes and destroying several structures.
Jessie Fischer's Airbnb rental off Highway 140 was sadly one of those homes flattened by the fire on the Fourth of July.
"I hope no one has to go through what we've gone through. It's truly terrible," Fischer said. "Driving up that driveway and hoping that part of your house is there, it was still smoking and smoldering, embers were flying around."
Fischer said she got a text from guests staying in the rental warning that there was smoke over the hill and they were evacuating the property. What happened next was all captured by a Ring camera at the front of the property.
"The ring camera showed the sheriff speeding off and then there were like flames and ashes on both sides and then the Ring camera shut off. So that's pretty scary," Fischer said.
It wouldn't be until Friday that her family got confirmation their home was one of several that burned in the fast-moving fire. Fire crews were able to stop it before it reached the heart of Mariposa where thousands of structures were threatened.
For Fischer, it's not the first time she's had to deal with something like this.
"Our first home was lost in the 2017 Atlas Fire in Napa, and having very close encounters with our other rentals in Yosemite, we knew this was a possibility," Fischer said.
She said having gone through the process before made her want to make changes and hopefully prevent someone else from experiencing this in the future. She has been working on creating technology with several universities to understand fire mitigation efforts.
"Just really taking charge and learning as much as I can about what's out there for detection and management, because wildfires we can't stop them from happening," Fischer said. "So, understanding the research behind it, diving deep into that."
She also wants to make the trauma and heartache of what happens after a fire easier for victims, like inventory management when victims have to itemize what they lost. She hopes that in the future, artificial intelligence can help make that process more streamlined and easier.
"You take a video of your room and you can speak through it, talk about these details, and then it detects everything in the room and then uploads into your app," Fischer said. "If you have vacation homes, you can see what's in every vacation home."
She said she hopes the technology can integrate into insurance companies to make the entire process easier, a first step in fixing a broken system, especially as the wildfire reality in California worsens each year with more devastating disasters.