22 September 2025
Partnerships on the Frontlines: Town of Paradise and Witching Hour
The FireTech Podcast
About
The FireTech Podcast' Season 2 (2025) examines the emerging dynamics of public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) in building wildfire resilience.
Through four conversations with community partners and technical leads, we examine how diverse partners cultivate trust, accountability, and responsiveness to shared wildfire resilience goals on the frontlines. We uncover what responsible innovation for wildfire resilience entails, particularly as it relates to co-developing useful and usable innovations that can amplify capacities on the ground.
In this first episode, Wonder Labs' cofounder Shefali J Lakhina speaks with Susan Hartman from the Town of Paradise in California and Lance Adler from The Witching Hour in Tennessee, USA.
Susan and Lance came together as one of the Conservation X Labs’ Fire Grand Challenge teams last year. They’re piloting Witching Hour's robotic system that installs insulation over live power lines, to reduce the risk of utility caused wildfires.
Susan Hartman is Community Development Director for the Town of Paradise. She has been with the Town of Paradise for just over 31 years, having worked in Finance, Wastewater, Building, Engineering, Solid Waste, & Planning. She’s worked on multiple disasters including the 2008 Butte Lightening Complex (37 fires over 59k acres), 2016 Saddle Fire, the 2017 Oroville Dam Spillway event & the Honey Fire, and the 2018 Camp Fire.
Lance Adler is Founder & CEO of Witching Hour, a startup working to prevent wildfires caused by power companies. A former PG&E engineer, Lance understands the need for insulating live power lines using advanced materials and robotics. The Witching Hour’s solution is working to reduce faults and ignitions that can lead to catastrophic fires on landscapes and in communities.
Through four conversations with community partners and technical leads, we examine how diverse partners cultivate trust, accountability, and responsiveness to shared wildfire resilience goals on the frontlines. We uncover what responsible innovation for wildfire resilience entails, particularly as it relates to co-developing useful and usable innovations that can amplify capacities on the ground.
In this first episode, Wonder Labs' cofounder Shefali J Lakhina speaks with Susan Hartman from the Town of Paradise in California and Lance Adler from The Witching Hour in Tennessee, USA.
Susan and Lance came together as one of the Conservation X Labs’ Fire Grand Challenge teams last year. They’re piloting Witching Hour's robotic system that installs insulation over live power lines, to reduce the risk of utility caused wildfires.
Susan Hartman is Community Development Director for the Town of Paradise. She has been with the Town of Paradise for just over 31 years, having worked in Finance, Wastewater, Building, Engineering, Solid Waste, & Planning. She’s worked on multiple disasters including the 2008 Butte Lightening Complex (37 fires over 59k acres), 2016 Saddle Fire, the 2017 Oroville Dam Spillway event & the Honey Fire, and the 2018 Camp Fire.
Lance Adler is Founder & CEO of Witching Hour, a startup working to prevent wildfires caused by power companies. A former PG&E engineer, Lance understands the need for insulating live power lines using advanced materials and robotics. The Witching Hour’s solution is working to reduce faults and ignitions that can lead to catastrophic fires on landscapes and in communities.