Hangar Team Spotlight - Tom Harbour on the Future of Firefighting

Hangar Team Spotlight:

Tom Harbour on the Future of Firefighting

For this team spotlight, we spoke with Tom Harbour, Cornea’s Chief Fire Officer. Tom joined Cornea after a long and illustrious career in the U.S. Forest Service, where he served at every level of wildland firefighting, from GS-2 firefighter to his tenure as the National Director of Fire and Aviation Management. He brings over five decades of wildland fire and disaster management experience to help Cornea create cutting-edge technology for incident command teams on-site at national and international disasters. 

Can you tell us a bit about your career thus far and your path to Cornea?

In 1970, I started as a firefighter on the ground at the lowest levels. Forty six years later, with a lot of luck, family support and hard work, I finished my career with the Forest Service where I was the longest-serving National Fire Chief in the 110-year history of the agency — I spent more than 14 years in the role.

Even after I retired from service, I was still passionate about saving lives and enabling our firefighters and emergency responders to be more effective and efficient in their work. That’s why when I was introduced to Cornea about three years ago, I was attracted to Cornea’s mission of helping to save the lives of emergency responders and make firefighting processes become more efficient and effective. 

What is your role at Cornea?

As the Chief Fire Officer at Cornea, I focus on how we can develop products that address the varying needs of firefighters and their supervisors to better manage the multitude of situations they face. 

While I haven’t been out in the field building firelines for years, the work that the women and men do out there — the tools they use, the tone of that work, the chaos, the sweat and the heat of that work — hasn't changed much. We want to help develop new, data and science-driven products that can bring wildland firefighting into the 21st century. My goal is to build tools that are complex enough to account for the immense amount of information firefighters are deluged with, while also simple enough to use in the conditions they work in so that they can rely on it without question. 

What is Cornea's vision?

Our essential vision is to provide reliable and actionable information to the men and women on the front lines of a natural disaster -- whether a wildfire or tornado or earthquake -- who are tasked with extremely consequential decision-making amid chaos and under pressure. With lives at risk and a ton of information floating around at any one time, we don’t want decision-makers to just have to rely on their gut when considering the next move or longer-term strategy — which is how I learned — but rather provide them with a tool that puts concrete information in front of them that validates their decision. Put simply, Cornea is a decision aid for decision-makers. 

What are the top three most pressing priorities for the future of wildland firefighting?

The ability to protect and sustain life is the most critical. According to U.S. statistics, the line of duty deaths for firefighters in the city appears to be decreasing due to decades of focus and work, accumulating better building codes, equipment, training and supervision. However, we see no such indication of this trend for wildland firefighting. That’s why I come to work every morning at Cornea. That’s what inspired me when I started in the field and what inspires me to this day.

The second priority is that it is essential to be effective and efficient. In the U.S., the direct cost of wildland fire is measured in the billions of dollars and the annual economic burden of wildland fire has been estimated to approach $400 billion. The way we’re fighting wildland fires now is extremely costly. 

Finally, it’s important to diversify the firefighting workforce. We’ve been a male-dominated workforce for a long, long time. I am confident that if we can lower the risk, improve efficiency and demonstrate the simplicity and reliability of very pertinent technology, we can make this work more attractive to a broader set of individuals. 

That means involving young people from a broad range of backgrounds — from cities and rural areas, male and female — who really want to do this work. And that’s vital for the future of natural resources in a nation that’s continuing to grow and put demands on those very resources. The linkage that I want people to see is how the wildlands and wildland fire ecology affects all of us, citizens in the heart of New York to folks in the forest.

How is Cornea shifting the paradigm for firefighting?

When I was coming up, I learned by listening, watching and witnessing thousands of stories and fires. I’ve tried to reconcile two truths: every fire is different and every fire is the same. The only way we’ve learned in the past is to try to provide firefighters with experience. We attempt to give as many opportunities to be in as many places as possible within a year. It can be stressful for firefighters to be on the road for that amount of time, but that’s the way we learn. We are facing different situations and ecosystems nearly every day.

Our work at Cornea is so important because firefighting actually hasn’t evolved much for centuries. In the past, we have not had reliable technology that could help us, almost instantaneously, in our decision-making. Now, by bringing together new technology and firefighting, we’re aiming to give firefighters that sense of preparation and that ability to think ahead about contingencies. We want to help firefighters look at a situation and know what kind of information you’ll need and how to array that data. By matching the needs of firefighters through tech, we can raise everyone’s game so that firefighters are safer and there’s more efficiency in time, energy and cost. 

And wildfires are just the beginning. We should be able to do the same with other natural disasters. Anytime there is an emergency, you need to slow things down to think through your next move. But of course, there’s no ability to say “time out” with the way these ecosystems and emergencies work. Our technology helps folks be able to take a breath, reassess what matters and why, and then make an informed decision.