Notes from the Denali Borough Project Kickoff

The Bintel Team was excited to win the contract to update two CWPPs and write two more covering the Denali Borough in Alaska.  The three day kickoff trip was a great series of meetings, tours and public engagement that was expertly orchestrated by the Borough team and partners.  The landscape is as rugged as one can imagine and the people are warm and friendly.  That said, this is not WUI as we know it. This is just Wild, no UI.  For now I offer up some pics and commentary from my first visit, but watch for more on the unique attributes of this CWPP project later this year.

Denali National Park - The Borough's namesake, Denali is massive and intimidating at 20,310 ft.  For those of us in Colorado, think about a 14er as you look up from 7500 ft.  The Denali Highway, AK3, the main road north south through the Borough is 1000 to 2000 ft so you're looking up 18,000 ft at nothing but rock and snow.  The surrounding terrain is just miles of snow and mountains in the Alaskan Range which separates Anchorage from Fairbanks.  This picture taken from the plane at sunset, doesn't do it justice.

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Vast Interior Rivers and Forests - some of the primary features of a CWPP is to plan for adequate access for fire fighters and evacuation for residents in the event of a fire.  I can't underscore the challenge any better than this picture.  Just imagine your home anywhere in this landscape and try to find your way in or out when a fire starts from lightning strikes with 50 mph winds.

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Great scenery and great people - Mother nature at her most spectacular in every direction, this at sunrise from the Denali Highway near the park entrance in McKinley.  Not a lot of people around this time of year, but the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

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We're excited to help the Anderson, Healy, McKinley and Cantwell communities build a good plan that will help them stay safe and preserve their rugged way of life, for the benefit of all of us.  This is why we do this work.

If you have questions or comments about your area and how to improve your community's wildfire planning, please contact us anytime.

Topics: Government, Earth Friendly, Wildfire, Geospatial, Risk Assessment, collaboration, cwpp, Bintel Mapping Tool, Forestry

Tom Marsh

Written by Tom Marsh

Tom has served as CEO of Bintel since cofounding the company in 2019. Before that he was COO of ai-one inc. where led the projects for NASA Marshall, SwissRe, Boeing and FedEx. For the past 15 years he has specialized in artificial intelligence applications for enterprise and government with a critical integration of Subject Matter Experts, AI, data, and visualizations. For FedEx this included topic classification and visualization of customer experience data collected weekly from survey data on FedEx.com. A project with an Army military intelligence group involved the development of a sophisticated intelligence platform that included GEOINT and provided situational awareness for an allied military. His current mission is to bring that caliber of solutions to counties in the West.

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