Wildfire risk · Colorado Western Slope
See the fire before it starts.
Forcasta is building a daily fire-start risk map for co-op service territories on Colorado's Western Slope, grounded in a century of high-country ecosystem data. It opens in a browser. It does not require a GIS department.
In development · Seeking 3–5 design-partner cooperatives for 2026–27
What you're actually managing
Three pressures, and no tool built for the utility carrying them.
Liability that outruns your balance sheet
One ignition traced back to your line can exceed the assets of an entire cooperative. Insurers know it, and they are pricing accordingly.
De-energization calls made half-blind
Public safety power shutoffs get decided on weather forecasts. Weather is one input. Fuel load, terrain, aspect, and stand history are the rest of it.
Software that assumes a department
Enterprise wildfire platforms are built for investor-owned utilities with GIS analysts on staff. You have an operations manager and a laptop.
The foundation
A hundred years of high country, going into the model.
The model will be built on a century of Gunnison County forest and ecosystem data — stand composition, fuel accumulation, burn history, moisture cycles — held by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Gothic, our founding scientific partner. The archive runs to thousands of concurrent data streams. It is public; untangling it is not.
Continuous record
How it works
From the archive to your morning briefing.
Start with the record
A century of Gunnison County forest and ecosystem data will form the baseline — the deepest continuous picture of how this specific high country burns.
Extend it across the Slope
The models will extend that baseline onto terrain the archive never covered directly, matching elevation, aspect, stand type and fuel behavior to produce risk where no century of local records exists.
Deliver a map, not a dataset
Daily fire-start risk across your service territory, broken out by sector — opening in a browser, readable at a glance, with nobody on your staff learning GIS. A 2026 feasibility study established the underlying signal; the production model is the work ahead.
Built for co-ops
Most wildfire software was not written with you in mind.
Enterprise platforms
- Priced for investor-owned utilities
- Assumes in-house GIS analysts
- Multi-quarter implementation
- Continental models, coarse locally
- Output is a data layer to interpret
Forcasta
- Priced for cooperative budgets
- No GIS expertise required
- Built for fast onboarding, not multi-quarter rollouts
- Built for Western Slope terrain
- Output is a decision you can act on
Design partners
Help us build it against your territory.
We're recruiting 3–5 design-partner cooperatives for the 2026–27 build. Tell us where you serve and we'll set up a conversation about what would actually be useful to your crews.