Almost ten years ago Joaquín Ramírez Cisneros, founder and executive director of Tecnosylva, began the process of implementing his fire and emergency simulation and prevention technology in the United States. He had been doing market research for several years as a visiting professor in summer courses, and launched into the promotion of the technology he was developing from his headquarters in the León Technology Park in an environment with gigantic fires and many means, but little technology. Its activity and its developments have grown exponentially in this period, while the threat of uncontrolled fires has become a priority problem all over the planet.
Now Tecnosylva takes another step in its growth. With a growing volume of business and contracts, its founder wanted to focus on technological development. Managing a project that keeps winning contracts and adding projects around the world also requires another formula.
The solution was the entry into the business of the US investment fund TA Associates, with the aim of quadrupling the company’s activity in four years. And advance in growth, innovation and employment with the same goal of exponential growth. With one condition. Maintain the “brain” of Tecnosylva in León. All the projects and applications that are applied in the world have been developed in its headquarters and will continue to be. «The managers of the investment fund have learned of our work in León, and it is true that the pandemic and the change in the working model have offered us other perspectives that we now use with much more efficiency. They know our talent and our hearts are here. They have seen it and are sharing it. In a decade we have gone from fewer than ten employees to about 60. Now the exponential growth begins. The tools will be applied worldwide, we will continue to have outstanding practitioners in various parts of the planet. But the heart of Tecnosylva will remain in León. It is the company’s philosophy. And a lot of that talent is local.”
The TA fund highlights Leon’s engineering for the development of innovative solutions for emergency management, especially focused on the forest fire sector. And that focuses most of its business in the United States, where they grew up from California. There they work with Calfire, one of the large state agencies that has selected Leon’s technology company among more than 130 companies, to try to control the devastating effects of the gigantic fires that occur continuously. “The tools that we have developed and improved are used today by thousands of commands in fire management and we also have contracts with the main electricity companies, whose activity is the cause of part of these fires,” explains Ramírez.
The contract came after the fire that devastated the city of Paradise in 2018, causing dozens of deaths and missing persons. “They had a lot of means, but no science or technology in what they did. They fought fires like they did in the 80s. They asked for innovative ideas, we applied and they selected us». Today Calfire is the largest and most innovative agency, after the federal government. “And for the one with the more complicated fires, which also gave us great exposure in the media.” From there they landed contracts with Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Oclahoma, Corolado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada. “And we’re about to sign the contract with Washington.”
In addition to the United States, and in parts of Spain, “the longest-term contract we have achieved is to organize the entire forest fire simulation and control system in the Netherlands. The fires are growing there, the weather conditions in northern Europe are changing rapidly and this is evident.
Tecnosylva also has contracts in Chile, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria,… We have also carried out a project in Saudi Arabia, where they have created a natural park linked to the world of hunting, and have entrusted us with the fire-fighting system».
In all those places they work with the technology developed in León and which continues to advance. “We have always been focused on forest fires. The most colorful are the operations to put them out, and we have the technology where firefighters go to the field with mobile applications, and are controlled by the central, where they coordinate and know where each operation is, have tactical maps and can operations and design goals.
One of these most innovative applications is Tactical Analyst, “a platform that allows you to act like a quasi-military operation, which is what you need when fires get out of control and you have to evacuate thousands of people, there is a great loss of houses… This platform allows you to follow the fire and anticipate how it will evolve, what means are there and how they should act, you follow the situation in real time through hundreds of cameras, you develop tactical cartography, you identify where the houses, critical infrastructures, water points,…».
In California alone, more than 6,000 managers share this information and instructions through their cell phones, with easy access. “It’s designed for what’s called ‘fat finger,’ big buttons, so it’s easy to use.”
All this operation is completed today with drones that capture more images and allow the planning of operations shared by all personnel.
«There is also a very important factor that we have always dedicated ourselves to, which is forecasting. When a fire breaks out we already tell them if it’s a 1 or a 5, whether or not they have to send how many people…». Although for Ramírez the most exciting thing, and also the most important, is to act before the fire breaks out. “That’s why we forecast five days in advance, with a very high level of detail of what can happen hour by hour. This is increasingly important and we have seen it this summer. That we are proactive, that before a fire breaks out we have all the information.”
For this they use another of the tools developed and which has been improved over time, Wildfire Analyst. “It runs millions of simulations, to study all the possibilities. If there’s already a fire, we use Tactical Analyst to coordinate and share information. And to manage all the means available there is the Fire Response application. Calfire alone has trained 60 specialists to manage Tecnosylva software.”
When Joaquín Ramírez settled in the United States in 2013 it was with the first versions of all these tools and their evolution “has been exponential. So we did a simulation and it took five minutes. Today in one hour we do 500 million simulations using supercomputing. And we do it every day.”
To do this, they use maps of fuels, vegetation,… Previous work that allows them to act and make very detailed forecasts.
All this technological growth has been accompanied, indeed driven, by “a team that has also grown a lot in terms of talent. Almost all Leonese».
The executive director of Tecnosylva underlines that in the working aspect “covid was almost an opportunity. It hasn’t opened up a new way of working, which we keep because it allows us to have people across the country or in other countries.”
Looking to the future, Ramírez is confident that the entry of the TA investment fund “will help us in our growth. Now we work with the best electric companies in the United States, but there are a dozen of them and we want to work with the 2,000 that are. And we also want to enter this market in Spain, Europe and South America. Globally. Because in the risk of fires caused by electricity there is no one who makes predictions like ours, that’s the key.
Working more in Spain is one of the wishes of the founder of the Leonese technology company. «The ideal would also be for the different agencies to collaborate, exchange data, use the same technology… In Europe, everyone goes their own way. We want to be in a reference position and that all European agencies can use our technology, as those in the United States do.”
In addition, Ramírez continues to teach in the Interuniversity Master in Forest Fires, which has already held 12 editions and has trained “high-level professionals, who work all over the world”. He carries out training in Technologies Applied to Emergencies and also in Emergency Organization and Management.
