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Tech startups innovate to snuff out wildfires

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TWAIN HARTE, Calif. -This is the tinderbox of the Sierra Nevada. It’s early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the air shimmers over dead trees choked in brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, past 20-foot-tall burn piles — tons of scrap wood not worth bringing to a sawmill. They’ve been assembled by workers on the front line of the fight against forest fires: a timber crew thinning these woods for the Forest Service and a tech startup that’s trying to automate the enormous machines the crew relies on.

They are called skidders: 10-foot-tall vehicles on four massive wheels, with a bulldozerlike blade on the front and a tree-size grapple dangling from the back. They are the worker bees, hauling downed logs from the forest to landing sites, where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks bound for the sawmill. Usually, a single driver operates them for a 12-hour shift, grabbing logs from behind and then driving forward.

Engineers at the Sonora, California, startup Kodama Systems, a forest management company, have hacked into a skidder built by Caterpillar, studded it with cameras and radar, and plugged it into the internet. The result is a remote-controlled machine that does scut work for a timber crew and teaches itself to operate semiautonomously, using lidar — or light detection and ranging — to map the forest.

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Green Dragon dispensaries, grow facility to remain open after cash infusion

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In an unexpected turn, Green Dragon, one of the largest dispensary chains in Colorado, will keep its stores and grow facility open.

The retailer’s parent company, California-based Eaze, got an infusion of $10 million from its owner, Jim Clark, to remain operating, it announced Tuesday. Clark, the billionaire founder of the defunct tech firm Netscape, foreclosed on the company’s assets in August for $54 million.

“We’ve just been working with the new ownership group to assess what we’re doing in the future,” said Cory Azzalino, Eaze’s CEO. “It’s nothing world-shaking, but I’m excited to keep going.”

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Green Dragon founders fired up to “get back to where we were” with new joint

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The first dispensary chain founded by Alex Levine, Andy Levine and Lisa Leder is preparing to cease operations in Colorado, three years after they sold it.

But they have high expectations for take two — their new chain, Fired Cannabis.

“Our plan is to get back to where we were,” said Alex Levine. “It’s just a long detour.”

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384 flights canceled at DIA as heavy snow pelts metro Denver

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At least 384 flights were canceled and 467 delayed at Denver International Airport on Friday as heavy snow pelted metro Denver and Colorado’s eastern plains.

The Federal Aviation Administration activated a traffic management program for flights bound for DIA “due to weather/snow-ice.” The average delay for flights under this plane was one hour and 50 minutes, FAA officials said, adding that departing flight schedules also may be affected by the weather.

There were 851 total delayed and canceled flights at DIA as of 11:45 a.m., according to Flight Aware. SkyWest reported the most cancellations with 183, followed by Southwest with 124, and Frontier with 30.

Read the rest of this story on TheKnow.DenverPost.com.



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