Safety · Ordinary People
The fifth-grader who started building a wildfire detector, and kept going until a city bought it
Irvine, California
A Newport Beach teenager started building wildfire sensors in fifth grade, and in July 2026 the City of Irvine signed on for the first paid deployment, across the Irvine Open Space Preserve.
The person and the place
He grew up in Newport Beach, California, and spent high school building wildfire sensors. This fall he heads to Stanford University on a Wildfire Fellowship, still directly involved in SensoRy AI, the company he founded while in high school.
The problem they cared about
In 2018 the Camp Fire burned more than 150,000 acres of Butte County and killed 85 people. He was in fifth grade, and started building.
The agency moment
He did not wait to be old enough. He started as an elementary school student, looking for a way to catch an ignition in its first minutes, and kept going: a grant, then a company founded while he was still in high school. Along the way it collected an Office of Naval Research Naval Science Award, and in 2019 the grand prize at the Ignite Innovation Student Challenge.
What changed, with evidence
The City of Irvine and the Orange County Fire Authority put test sensors in the ground with SensoRy AI last year. The city says they proved "highly effective at detecting wildfire ignitions and providing data on fire risk," and that in one deployment the network "detected and reported an ignition from more than a mile away before it was identified by residents or any camera systems." In July 2026 Irvine signed on for a large-scale network across the Irvine Open Space Preserve, funded by the City of Irvine, the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, and the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program at the California Department of Conservation. Michael O'Connell, who leads the conservancy, says it has supported him and SensoRy AI since the very beginning. Installation begins in early 2027. He told KTLA it is the first paid project.
The move worth copying
The sensors are the impressive part. The move worth copying is quieter: he treated a fifth-grade science project as unfinished rather than graded, and was still working on it eight years later. Know someone still building the thing they started years ago? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"With greater than 1,200 feet line of sight and around 300 feet of non-line of sight, we're able to detect fire that's smaller than one foot." — SensoRy AI's teenage founder, NBC Los Angeles
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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