About Us
Why we started
Headwater Fire was born as a response to the devastating fires that took place January 7, 2025. The Palisades and Eaton fires tore through Los Angeles — together destroying over 16,000 structures, killing 31 people, and forcing more than 200,000 residents to flee. Block after block of Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Malibu was reduced to rubble in a matter of hours. These weren't remote forests burning in distant mountains. These were neighborhoods. Schools. Decades of family memories. And they weren't outliers — they were the inevitable result of a decades-long trend.
Across the Western U.S., wildfire-caused structure loss more than tripled between the prior decade and 2010–2020, and the destruction per acre burned rose by roughly 160% in the same period. Climate change has added roughly nine additional high-fire days per year since 2000. The scale and frequency of these events are accelerating, and watching communities we love be devastated — while knowing technology existed that could have protected many of those homes — was something we couldn't ignore.
Why we exist
The hard truth is that most homes don't burn because a wall of flame overtakes them — they burn because wind-driven embers land on a dry roof, collect in a gutter, or ignite a wood deck while no one is there to stop it. And when a fire is large enough to threaten an entire neighborhood, fire crews have to triage. Your home may be on its own. For decades, the conversation around wildfire protection has focused almost entirely on defensible space and building materials — important measures, but passive ones that don't activate when the ember storm arrives.
In the last ten years, despite fires growing dramatically larger and more destructive, the options available to individual homeowners have barely evolved. Meanwhile, the evidence for exterior sprinkler systems has been building quietly: in the 2007 Ham Lake Fire, 72% of surviving structures had working sprinklers. In the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, 87% of homes with roof sprinklers installed survived. British Columbia's Wildfire Service has deployed sprinkler-based Structure Protection Units as a standard operational tool for years. This technology works — it keeps homes wet, suppresses ember ignition, and creates a window of survival even after you've evacuated. It just hasn't been made widely available, affordable, or easy to deploy for everyday homeowners. That's the gap Headwater Fire exists to close.