Nineteen Men Died Because Nobody Could See Where They Were
On June 30, 2013, nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. It was the deadliest wildfire disaster for firefighters in the United States since 1933. The crew was overrun by a wind-driven fire that changed direction with catastrophic speed. They deployed their fire shelters in a box canyon with no escape route.
Incident Command had no way to see their positions. No real-time tracking. No GPS overlay on a fire map. No automated proximity alert when the fire perimeter shifted toward them. The information existed in scattered systems. It just never reached the people who needed it in time.
Twelve years later, the U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed that the Forest Service still cannot track the locations of most of its firefighters on foot during wildfires.
I know, because I built the system that could have saved them. In 2013. And then I watched the federal government ignore it for a decade.
This is the story of Project Prometheus — an unfinished mission that started the day those nineteen men died, proved itself in 350 miles of field testing with zero errors, was presented to 20,000 professionals at the world’s largest GIS conference, and was shelved because one engineer in Pecos, New Mexico couldn’t penetrate the federal bureaucracy alone.
I’m picking it back up. And this time, the technology — and the team — are ready to finish the job.
PART ONE: THE ORIGIN
Pecos, New Mexico — Summer 2013
My son and I had just completed a 14-day structure protection assignment on the Tres Lagunas Fire — a Type 1 incident that was literally in our own back yard. We were owners of Adventech Engineering, LLC, a small design firm specializing in advanced safety systems. At the time, we’d been developing a satellite-based GPS mapping system for railroad maintenance and ground crews — tracking workers through remote terrain where cell coverage didn’t exist.
Then the Yarnell Hill news broke. Nineteen dead. And the investigation revealed what we already suspected: the technology to track those firefighters existed. It just hadn’t been assembled into a system that worked where fires actually burn — in remote, mountainous terrain with no cellular infrastructure.
We made the decision the same week. If our satellite tracking system could follow railroad workers through the backcountry, it could follow firefighters through fire zones.
In September 2013, ARGOS FireTech was formed and work began on PROMETHEUS — an advanced GIS application for real-time surveillance of deployed firefighters and their equipment. The name was chosen deliberately: Prometheus, the Greek Titan who brought fire to mankind. Our mission was equally defiant — to bring technology to firefighters that the federal government had failed to provide.
The Technology Gap
There was a problem. In 2013, the geoprocessing services required to handle the volume of real-time data — thousands of GPS position reports, fire perimeter updates, weather feeds, and terrain analysis — simply did not exist commercially. The vision exceeded the available technology.
We didn’t wait. While the processing technology caught up, we assembled the foundation:
- Dual-mode satellite/GSM GPS system using the Iridium Satellite Network — guaranteed communications anywhere on Earth, zero cell dependency
- Blue Sky Network partnership for satellite service and tracking hardware
- FireWatch® web mapping application built on the Esri ArcGIS platform with Digital Globe satellite imagery
- ICS forms module in SharePoint — complete NIMS-compliant incident management
- Large-format touchscreen command post — 65-90 inch display with digital pen annotation for tactical planning
Then, in early 2015, high-speed geoprocessing became commercially available. ARGOS FireTech created the first real-time firefighting hazard analysis and tracking application anywhere.
What PROMETHEUS Could Do
This was not a proof-of-concept or a slide deck. This was a working, field-tested platform:
- Real-time GPS tracking of every firefighter and piece of equipment — positions updated continuously via satellite, displayed on FireWatch®
- Automated proximity alerts — geoprocessing compared firefighter positions to fire perimeters in real time, triggering warnings when personnel approached safety buffer boundaries
- Predictive fire growth modeling — projected fire behavior overlaid on personnel positions
- Best-route terrain analysis — intelligent algorithms for optimal field assignments and evacuation routing
- Satellite-based two-way messaging — if a firefighter couldn’t be reached by radio or cell, Incident Command could still see their exact position and dispatch help. The satellite link was guaranteed.
The critical design principle: Even if a firefighter was unreachable by every other means, IC could still see where they were and send help. This was not a feature. This was the entire point.
PART TWO: PROVING IT WORKED
Field Testing — 2016-2017 Fire Seasons
PROMETHEUS was extensively field-tested under real-world conditions during the 2016 and 2017 fire seasons. Two ARGOS FireTech firefighters were tracked for over 350 miles through the San Juan Mountains of New Mexico and Wyoming. The system displayed over 15,000 position reports and collected thousands of data points.
The result: zero errors. Not one missed position. Not one false alert. Not one communication failure. Three hundred and fifty miles of continuous satellite tracking through some of the most rugged terrain in the American West, and the system performed flawlessly.
“Knowing that a team member was monitoring my location on a computer screen back at the ARGOS FireTech office was immensely reassuring, even under normal circumstances. When things became seriously stressful, it was a life-saver.”
“On the Yarnell Hill Fire, it would have been the difference between life and death.”
Esri User Conference — San Diego, July 2017
ARGOS FireTech was invited to present FireWatch® at the 2017 GIS and Emergency Management User Conference in San Diego, California — the largest event of its kind in the world, drawing nearly 20,000 GIS and emergency management professionals.
I delivered a 30-minute video presentation as company founder and senior design engineer. The response was immediate:
- Southern California Fire and EMS managers requested detailed demonstrations
- Australian Emergency Management Team representatives expressed major interest for deployment overseas, where extremely remote wildfires are fought using mostly volunteer crews
- Industry professionals recognized PROMETHEUS as the first comprehensive solution of its kind
We announced plans to deploy PROMETHEUS teams within the SWCC area — Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas — and begin processing hundreds of simultaneous resource feeds on large incidents.
The technology worked. The market responded. Everything was in place.
And then nothing happened.
PART THREE: A DECADE OF FEDERAL INDIFFERENCE
“Over the last year and a half I have written several articles on LinkedIn about our efforts with PROMETHEUS and its ability to protect firefighters, but we just haven’t made the right impression. Despite our initial success, we remain virtually unknown, unfunded, and worst of all, unused.” — Bill King, 2018
The problem was never the technology. The problem was access, funding, and federal procurement. A small company in Pecos, New Mexico — run by a firefighter and engineer who built a working system with his own money — could not penetrate the federal bureaucracy.
The U.S. Forest Service, the agency responsible for wildland firefighter safety, would not engage. No GSA Schedule meant no federal contracts. No VC funding meant no runway. No policy connections meant no congressional champions. The system that could track firefighters in real time sat unused while the agencies responsible for protecting them relied on voice radio and morning briefing assignments to estimate where 11,000 firefighters might be during active fires.
I shelved Prometheus. Not because it didn’t work. Because I couldn’t fight the bureaucracy alone.
Life moved on. I built a 30-year career in construction management, earned my PMP, managed over a billion dollars in Department of Defense projects. Founded Trajanus. Partnered with Tom Chlebanowski, PE. Built a team of twelve professionals covering PM, QC, safety, engineering, and technology.
But the mission never left. Firefighters kept dying in conditions where real-time tracking would have made the difference. And I kept watching the federal government fail to solve a problem I’d already solved.
PART FOUR: THE GAO CONFIRMS WHAT I ALREADY KNEW
GAO-25-107905 — September 25, 2025
On September 25, 2025, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published GAO-25-107905: “Forest Service: Next Steps Are Uncertain for Improving Communications for Wildland Firefighters and Tracking Their Locations.”
The findings read like a validation of every argument I’d been making since 2013:
- Cannot track firefighters on foot: The Forest Service cannot track the specific locations of most of its approximately 11,000 wildland firefighters on foot during a fire.
- Voice-only communications: Capabilities consist primarily of voice-only push-to-talk radios. Officials stated that situational awareness requires data transmission that radios do not provide.
- WFTAK app — 378 of 11,000: As of July 2025, only 378 firefighters were voluntarily using the tracking app — still in development.
- GPS devices — 800 of 11,000: 829 GPS devices purchased for $1.7 million. 80% of that cost was subscription fees. Only 800 deployed.
- Dingell Act unfunded: The 2019 law required joint development of a tracking system but provided no appropriations.
- Staff lost, projects paused: The tools and technology program lost 2 of 3 permanent staff. NASA collaboration postponed. GPS procurement delayed. Mapping improvements paused.
- No strategic plan: The Forest Service does not have a comprehensive strategic plan for improving these capabilities.
The GAO report even references Yarnell Hill directly: “A review of a 2013 wildfire in Arizona identified insufficient information about the firefighter locations as a contributing factor to the deaths of 19 firefighters.”
The exact event that created Prometheus. The exact problem Prometheus solved. Twelve years later, the GAO is recommending the Forest Service develop a strategic plan to address it.
I had a working solution in 2015. The federal government still doesn’t have one in 2026.
The Scale of the Crisis
- In 2024, the U.S. experienced 64,897 wildfires burning 8,924,884 acres
- FEMA provided over $3.8 billion in wildfire-related assistance from FY2019-2023
- Wildfires cause an average of 12 firefighter deaths and cost at least $3.2 billion annually
- The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission issued 148 policy recommendations
- The Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act of 2025 is working through Congress
The federal government is spending billions on response and recovery. The technology to prevent firefighter deaths exists. The funding to deploy it does not. And the bureaucratic infrastructure to adopt it barely functions.
PART FIVE: PROMETHEUS 2026
What’s Changed Since 2017
Everything.
In 2013, Prometheus was one engineer with a satellite receiver. In 2026, it’s backed by Trajanus — a full-spectrum construction management firm managing $1.2 billion in active DoD projects with a team of 12 professionals, a proven desktop application platform (Tauri v2.0), and AI-augmented development capabilities.
The ENGINEERED INTELLIGENCE™ Difference
Trajanus operates under a core philosophy we call ENGINEERED INTELLIGENCE™. It means: AI generates, humans verify, clients receive. No blind automation. No unsupervised AI decisions. Every output goes through human quality assurance before it reaches the field.
For Prometheus, this translates to: AI Predicts · Humans Decide · Firefighters Come Home.
The AI processes satellite feeds, weather data, terrain models, and firefighter positions to predict fire spread and identify threats. It generates alerts and recommendations. But a human — the Incident Commander, the Division Supervisor, the Safety Officer — makes every decision. The AI doesn’t pull anyone off a line. It gives the people in charge the information they need to make that call themselves, in time.
This is not academic. The GAO’s own testimony from June 2025 noted that AI in wildfire applications “presents a risk of conveying inaccurate information, which can put lives and property at risk.” Human oversight isn’t a marketing concept for Trajanus. It’s a safety requirement.
The Product Vision
Prometheus 2026 is a desktop application built on Tauri v2.0 — the same architecture powering the Trajanus Enterprise Hub, our construction management platform already in use on active DoD projects. The core capabilities:
- Real-time firefighter tracking independent of cell coverage — satellite-based, same principle as the original, modernized hardware
- AI-enhanced fire behavior prediction — integrating FlamMap/Rothermel fire spread algorithms with machine learning for faster, more accurate projections
- GIS integration — native compatibility with ArcGIS and open-source alternatives, IRWIN/IROC data feeds, NASA FIRMS thermal detection
- Automated safety alerts — fire spread prediction overlaid on personnel positions, with configurable buffer zones and escalation protocols
- Interagency interoperability — designed from day one to work across USFS, DOI, BLM, state, and local agencies
- Complete ICS documentation — NIMS-compliant forms, resource tracking, dispatch coordination, all integrated
THE PATH FORWARD
In 2013, I was one engineer with a satellite receiver and a vision. I couldn’t get the federal government’s attention, and nineteen families never got the technology that might have brought their people home.
In 2026, I’m the CEO of a firm that manages over a billion dollars in active Department of Defense construction projects. I have a partner who’s a licensed Professional Engineer. I have a team of twelve. I have a proven desktop application platform. I have AI-augmented development capability that lets us build in months what used to take years.
The GAO just confirmed — in a report to Congress — that the problem I solved a decade ago is still unsolved. The Forest Service doesn’t have a plan. They don’t have the staff. They don’t have the funding. And every fire season, they send 11,000 firefighters into terrain where nobody can see where they are.
I’m not asking for permission anymore. I’m building it.
I did all this on my own 13 years ago. Imagine what we can do now.
PROJECT PROMETHEUS
AI Predicts · Humans Decide · Firefighters Come Home
TRAJANUS | ENGINEERED INTELLIGENCE™
trajanus-usa.com | Bill King, PMP | Principal & CEO
Sources: GAO-25-107905 (Sept 2025), GAO-25-108589 (June 2025), GAO-25-106862 (Dec 2024), Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act of 2025, Yarnell Hill Fire Investigation Report (2013), NIFC Annual Report 2024.