How a Small Tahoe Community Became a Model for Wildfire Defense

August 13th, 2025

By Luqman Adeniyi, Los Angeles Times

It’s often said that wildfire prevention is the only real defense a neighborhood has against disaster. Images from the Eaton and Palisades fires that swept through Los Angeles seared that idea into the minds of people across the country, pushing many of them to take a closer look at how to protect their own homes.

But even before those images of fiery devastation rolled across screens, one mountain community in Nevada’s Lake Tahoe region was already rolling up its sleeves.

In Tyrolian Village, residents decided they weren’t going to rely on luck if disaster struck. Instead, they launched a wildfire defense project in the fall of 2024, an effort that soon drew attention, earning them grants, a partnership with a local nonprofit, and a visit from some fire-stamping, brush-chomping robots that will help their neighborhood become a model for other wildfire-prone communities facing the same threat.

HOA President to Wildfire Prevention Champion

Greg Erfani didn’t set out to launch a fire resilience revolution but stumbled into it after moving up to the Tyrolian Village community in Incline Village, Nevada, and being convinced to run for the homeowners’ association board.

“Everybody knows HOA boards are not really the most fun or where you want to be,” Erfani said.

But he still decided to run and became president in August 2024. After he won his seat, “one of my good friends up here said, ‘Well, now, what are you going to do?’” Erfani recalled.

With that question, he quickly realized he needed a signature project to go along with his new role and decided that fire prevention was the best thing to do after reflecting on his time living near Lake Arrowhead, where he experienced three wildfires.

“We had a lot of dead trees,” Erfani explained.

The dense nature of the forest by the lake made each tree a matchstick, adding fuel to any fire that came along, and Tyrolian Village was in danger of suffering a similar fate.

Erfani said Tyrolian Village had 128 dead trees over 67 acres ready to be ignited.

“That’s about two or three dead trees per acre. So that was the first thing that we knew was really bad that we needed to do,” Erfani said.

Everyone was quickly on board to take on wildfire prevention, but as they started to learn that they also needed to eliminate the ground fuel in the low-lying brush, their HOA’s wildfire prevention budget wasn’t enough, so they began applying for grants.

They didn’t receive the first grant they applied for in October 2024, but they did receive $300,000 from the Western Wildland Urban Interface Grant soon after.

“We were one of the only [HOAs] in the state of Nevada that got this grant,” Erfani said.

An Avalanche of Support

That initial win set off a chain reaction.

“We got the grant, then we got North Lake Tahoe Fire Department on board, and then the Tahoe Fund called and said, ‘Hey, we want to pilot this program to see if we can make a community safer,’” Erfani said.

That call from the Tahoe Fund, a nonprofit with experience in forest resilience projects, changed everything. Amy Berry, the Tahoe Fund’s CEO, had been looking for a community with both the motivation and the structure to test a new approach.

“We look for communities that are ready to go, that have leadership, and we help them pull in additional partners, funding and tools,” Berry said. “[Tyrolian Village] had already done so much work as a community. It wasn’t just one or two people. They had a board that was already budgeting for wildfire prevention and a willingness to work with their local fire department and agencies.”

People are gathered in a large room with chairs facing a seated panel. One panelist stands by a map and speaks into a mic.

The momentum the community already had, combined with a leader in Greg Erfani, made Tyrolian Village an easy choice for community wildfire defense pilot, Berry said.

“I mean, that guy is, he is just the perfect person to be your idol. I like, idolize that guy. He’s my hero because he said, ‘You know what? This is too important,’” Berry said. “He’s lost a family member in a fire. And he was like, ‘let’s do something about it.’”

The Tahoe Fund initiated partnerships and collaborations with nearby agencies and groups, serving as a connector to bring in scientists, home-hardening experts, insurance experts, and BurnBot, a startup offering tech-powered vegetation removal, which addressed the direct needs of Tyrolian Village.

The Age of Robots and Wildfire Prevention

The Tyrolian Village wildfire mitigation project, initiated by Erfani and his HOA board, unfolded in multiple phases after evolving into something bigger. It began with debris and vegetation removal in 2024, when the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District hand-thinned 26.8 acres of ground fuels. Then in 2025, BurnBot’s remote-operated machines cleared an additional 35.9 acres, as part of the Tahoe Fund’s Incline Fire Smart Community Pilot. By the end of this phase, all 62.7 acres in the community had received wildfire treatments.

Erfani said the shift from manual labor to robotic tech made the land and brush clearing part of the project more efficient and digestible because the results were precise and surprisingly attractive.

“When you go from four weeks to 10 days, the cost drops dramatically. It drops 75%,” Erfani said enthusiastically. “A lot of people were worried. ‘What’s it going to look like? Are we going to live on the moon?’ But honestly, it just looks like our community had a nice trim. It doesn’t look like, you know, shaved bald, it’s a nice haircut that we got,” Erfani said.

Orange Burnbot mastication machine that chews dead vegetation and brush that can become ground fuel for a wildfire.

BurnBot’s remote-operated system first works by having one machine masticating or chewing up dead branches, dry grass, and overgrown plants in the brush, creating a cleared, defensible space for the community it is servicing.

Then a second, propane-powered machine uses prescribed burning to clear the brush and captures everything inside a sealed chamber, so almost no smoke escapes. Most of what’s left is ash, which helps the soil and is deposited back into the ground. Any remaining noxious compounds and particulate matter are filtered out with water inside the machine. This makes the process much safer and cleaner than traditional burning, allowing it to be used right next to homes and other sensitive areas.

“The advantage of burning in an enclosed chamber is [that] many of the challenges that I listed earlier — the risk of escape, smoke, weather constraints — those all disappear,” BurnBot CEO and co-founder Anukool Lakhina said.

The precision and safety of Burn Bot’s land clearing make it an attractive option for wildfire prevention.

“You can now start bringing this age-old ecological idea [of controlled burns] next to homes, next to power lines, next to roadsides, next to hospitals, next to assisted living facilities, all of which need that fortification from destructive fires,” Lakhina said.

The cost for BurnBot to treat land varies depending on the complexity, but it typically ranges from $800 to $2,500 per acre for the initial treatment. Steep slopes and complex vegetation add to the initial cost, but follow-up maintenance treatments, which may occur every few years depending on the plant life, are often cheaper, typically in the hundreds of dollars per acre.

“Once we do the treatment, we’ll keep monitoring the regrowth, and once the regrowth of the vegetation has exceeded a certain threshold, we’ll schedule a follow-on treatment service,” Lakhina said. “This way the customer doesn’t have to worry about, ‘hey, am I getting out of compliance, or do I have a high fire risk?’ We’re monitoring that using a variety of methods.”

Again, the length of time needed to treat different properties depends on the landscape in each case, but a typical day for Burnbot is having two machines with three operators treat 3-6 acres, Lakhina said.

“Because it’s a robot, you need very small crews. You still need humans. You can never replace humans,” Lakhina said. “We imagine a world where robots work with humans to amplify their capacity so ... they can do 20 times more, and do it safely.”

The Burnbot mastication machine can operate near homes to clear brush for wildfire prevention. (Jeff Freeman/Tahoe Fund)

Residents of Tyrolian Village line the streets to watch a Burnbot mastication machine trim the brush near their neighborhood that could become ground fuel for a wildfire. (Jeff Freeman/Tahoe Fund)

The ability of the Burbot system to treat hazardous areas close to homes and near utilities allowed residents to see how it all works up close.

“People ran out and wanted to see it, and these guys were great, they would explain what it was doing, and the residents got into it,” Erfani said. “I would see 12 of my neighbors out there watching it for an hour. … It was a community bonding event. That’s nothing that we had planned.”

Instead of “moonscaping” open fields, BurnBot’s machines left a mulched layer behind that holds the soil in place, preventing erosion that might happen with bulldozers or other land-clearing and fire-defense techniques.

“Oftentimes when we work with property owners, they’re like, ‘We didn’t even know we had this area here. This has cleared it all up. Now I don’t have to worry about poison oak,” Lakhina said.

Insurance and the Cost of Wildfire Prevention

One of the main goals behind the Tyrolian Village pilot is to demonstrate that insurance pricing doesn’t have to be a one-way, closed-off, unchanging process.

For years, insurers have responded to wildfire risk by imposing steep premium hikes or dropping coverage. The hope is that scaled, documented mitigation applied across whole neighborhoods can change their equations.

Andrew Engler, CEO and founder of Rockrose Risk, takes the fire prevention steps carried out by communities, such as creating defensible space, upgrading vents, and removing hazardous trees, and turns them into detailed risk reports, sometimes 30 to 50 pages long. These reports show insurance carriers exactly what’s been done, helping homeowners make the case for lower rates.

“On average, we give people about a 35% discount or more on their insurance if they do fuel reduction, home hardening, structure hardening — things we recommend,” Engler said.

The second phase of the pilot involved home-by-home risk assessments, aimed at encouraging the entire community to make changes that would mitigate risks in the area and, consequently, reduce insurance premiums.

Following additional financial support from another partner, NV Energy, each of the 228 homes in Tyrolian Village received a customized inspection detailing the changes they needed to make to help them survive a wildfire.

This included adding double-pane windows, replacing thatched roofs with ceramic roofs, changing grates with wide openings on the sides of homes, and cleaning out gutters full of debris.

“You need this to be done by everyone,” Engler said. “Because you can have one property that mitigates itself, and if it’s close enough to the next property, the radiant heat and energy give off is going to melt that property and continue to cause that conflagration down.”

The possible reduction in insurance costs and protection for their neighborhood made it easy for Tyrolian’s residents to invest in their homes and make the suggested changes.

Most of the expenses for the program and community-level assessment for home hardening were covered by grants, and the HOA also had a long-standing budget item for wildfire prevention, so extra fees to residents were minimal.

“Nobody argued,” Erfani said. “They’ll do that all day long. You give me 100 bucks and I give you $1,000. Everybody jumped on that,” Erfani said.

Lessons for Southern California

As more communities in California and the Western United States face rising insurance rates and wildfire risk, the lessons from Tyrolian Village are already spreading. Other HOAs have reached out asking how they can start their own projects and the Tahoe Fund is working on completing similar pilots in the region.

“The [Tyrolian Village] pilot is designed to show what’s possible when you combine local action, new technology, and smart partnerships,” Berry said. “If it works here, it can work in other communities facing the same risks.”

One struggle they faced with the pilot was establishing communication with all the residents to read the reports, as well as the extra time and coordination it would take to identify reputable contractors to implement the suggested fire-hardening changes.

“Lake Tahoe is a resort, right? So not everybody lives up here,” Erfani explained.

To make it easier for everyone, especially part-time residents, Erfani said the pilot organizers added an additional piece to their program and “brought in a group that can do the actual physical labor for people, so people don’t have to go out and try to find some.”

Erfani was also worried that some property owners might not want people on their land to do the inspections, Burnbot treatments, or home-hardening while they are not there, or even run into elderly residents who might want to shoo people off their property.

“We had none of that. They were welcoming,” Erfani said. “Our whole community has been very engaged and welcoming in this whole entire process.”

Here’s how you can work to find the right partners, galvanize your neighbors to act, and turn wildfire anxiety into fire-proofed confidence that can reduce your insurance bill, too.

Start local with a motivated HOA, community board or small team that can drive the process.
Build relationships with nonprofits, such as the Tahoe Fund, local fire departments, corporations, and government organizations that have extensive networks and funding to award grants for wildfire defense.
Embrace new technology like BurnBot that can make large-scale mitigation feasible and affordable, or look for other tech tools and data companies in the burgeoning wildfire prevention space like Vibrant Planet, Technosylva, Gridware or Frontline Wildfire Defense Systems.
Make it an ongoing effort because wildfire defense is not one-and-done. Communities will need regular ground fuel maintenance, continuous education and outreach for homeowners, and budget planning.
Document everything to create detailed records of mitigation work that can be used to negotiate with insurers and prove community resilience.

And Erfani’s added advice for implementing the same changes is simple: Don’t give up, take the time to do the research, and find the skills that are within your community.

As for the costs, “Google search, Google search, Google search,” Erfani emphasized. “I saw communities that got grants, because sometimes they’re in the newspaper, and I read what grant it was, and then I went and researched that grant.”

He also added that, “it’s never the avenue that you think is going to give you your insight. It’s sort of that open the door, that opens the door, that you go down these stairs, and then all of a sudden, eventually you get there, but you have to be persistent,” Erfani added.

Berry said the most important thing is having someone like Erfani who will push the project through to the finish line.

“Every community needs a champion. The groundwork was already there [in Tyrolian Village] and we just helped build the bridge to the next phase.”

But again, Erfani deflects and dishes out praise to his neighbors and Tyrolian Village HOA board members, as well as the pilot partners for the program’s success, pinpointing how the project relies on their input, expertise, and enthusiasm to make all the difference.