Future-Proofing Wildfire Resilience
Athena Intelligence Helps Communities and Utilities Stay Ahead
Wildfires have change: So has the way we understand them. Once thought of as a seasonal challenge, it’s now a year-round variable — shaping infrastructure planning, insurance markets, municipal budgets, and public trust. The organizations that thrive in this new environment won’t be the ones with the most data; they’ll be the ones asking the best questions.
At Athena Intelligence, we built Voice of the Acre® to do exactly that — transform wildfire risk from a static map into a living framework for decision-making. Our goal isn’t just to show where fire might strike, but to help utilities and communities future-proof their wildfire strategy by staying adaptive, contextual, and grounded in the terrain itself.
Voice of the Acre doesn’t just assign risk scores. It reveals relationships — between fuels, slopes, human activity, fire recurrence, and infrastructure exposure. It connects what’s happening on the ground to the value of the liabilities, the organization’s Balance Sheet. Voice of the Acre identifies and quantifies environmental volatility into financial insight.
For many of our partners, the technology has become a critical part of their wildfire mitigation ecosystem. As one user at a midsized public utility described:
Athena data is an invaluable resource for the development of PNM’s Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP) strategy. The data is used to define Hazardous Fire Risk Areas (HFRA’s) throughout our service territory. It is used extensively during refinement of those boundaries based on isolation devices such as reclosers and switches and helps us determine where to put boots on the ground for detailed visual analysis by engineers and vegetation management crews.
[Later] it is used as an additional layer of consideration in identifying which assets benefit most from hardening mitigation strategies and is used as a tool to enhance our asset data for more targeted financial planning.
That evolution — of both questions and use cases — is precisely the point. The best resilience tools don’t just provide answers; they create space for discovery.
At Athena, we’ve seen our partners go from asking where are our riskiest areas? to how can we optimize shutdown zones, prioritize vegetation work, and plan our capital upgrades based on predictive insight instead of reactive data?
Voice of the Acre is designed to scale with that line of inquiry. From community planners to investor-owned utilities, from insurance underwriters to bond analysts, Athena’s terrain-based wildfire profiles are helping users understand risk not as a snapshot but as a system.
The product is also built to be intuitive. That matters. We’ve learned that the more easily wildfire data can be interpreted — by engineers, policymakers, or ratepayer engagement teams — the more it gets used. A single, location-specific Risk Score distills the complex factors that shape fire behavior into an accessible format, derived from both conditional land characteristics and probabilistic burn models. No training required. No translation necessary.
Wildfire resilience isn’t a checklist. It’s an ongoing process. And it needs a partner that can help turn land-based data into long-term thinking.
Athena Intelligence exists to be that partner — supporting utilities, communities, and agencies as they adapt to a future where wildfire isn’t just a risk to manage, but a signal to learn from.
If your organization is planning for wildfire today, you need data that’s already anticipating tomorrow.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Our primary clients are electric utilities, especially municipal utilities, community owned cooperative electrical companies and community aggregators. Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into multiple products that can be accessed through an online portal.
Athena’s data is currently used in wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), Risk Spend Efficiency reporting to PUCs and other stakeholders.
You can reach out to me at Elizabeth@AthenaIntel.io and follow us on LinkedIn or Energy Central
Athena Intelligence helps cities and public supported utilities plan their disaster mitigation.
If you’re a local official, utility manager, or CWPP consultant, we’d love to connect and show you how Voice of the Acre® can support your community’s resilience journey.
