There’s a wildfire moving toward your home. It’s blocked your usual highway route out of town. Do you know your back roads well enough to get to safety?
“We like to say in our organization that an unpaved road is one bad storm and 10 logging trucks away from looking completely different than it did before.”
Like many in Western Canada, IntelliMass founders Ryan Gallagher and Chris Stewart don’t have to imagine that stress. They’ve been forced down those back roads before, and even as recently as this month. To them, the biggest issue isn’t that the route could be filled with potholes, debris, and narrow passes; it’s that evacuees simply don’t know what to expect at all.
“We like to say in our organization that an unpaved road is one bad storm and 10 logging trucks away from looking completely different than it did before,” Stewart told BetaKit in a recent interview he and Gallagher sat for.
That unpredictability is why they made their first product, BackRoadIntel—a crowdsourced mapping platform that picks up where Google Maps leaves off. Using kinetic sensors in tandem with other vehicle data-collecting devices like dashcams, emergency and local authorities use the platform to catalogue back road conditions to inform evacuation routes.
“You drive a lot of kilometres of back roads; you encounter problems like rock slides, downed trees, a dead animal on the road, washout, or very rough road conditions. And now it’s up to you to do something about it when you get back,” Gallagher said. “That doesn’t always happen, right? And if it does, it’s often uncoordinated.”
With BackRoadIntel, drivers can narrate their back-road journey, commenting on every pothole and dusty area they come across. Once the driver is back in service, the data from the kinetic sensor, dashcam, and their commentary are automatically synced into a fulsome report on the road’s drivability.
“My main focus has been like, ‘this has to be really easy,’” Gallagher said. “This has to be so easy that it just works.”
The Kelowna, BC-based company has been engaged as a consultant to help plan evacuation routes. It also rents its equipment out to municipal and regional governments to do the same. Right now, local officials can request a BackRoadIntel community evacuation route assessment for just under $5,000, according to its website.
The startup is also looking to provide its services to Indigenous communities, getting its start by sponsoring its own pilot project with the Lytton-area First Nations. The area already has a tragic history with wildfires: back in 2021, Lytton almost entirely burned down in one of Canada’s worst wildfires, killing two people. The local First Nations community is made up of 12 bands and, according to Stewart, around a quarter of those bands only have one road out of their homes in the event of a wildfire.
“Even if there is only one option, you really want to understand what that road is capable of, how it’s holding up, [and] how it’s being deteriorated even by BC wildfire suppression efforts,” Stewart said, adding that the community often doesn’t have the data to prove how much their roads are eroding from wildfire countermeasures.
Wildfires in recent years have burned more Canadian land than ever before. The Canadian National Fire Database reports that more than 34 million hectares of land have burned since 2020; over half of which occurred in 2023. That is double the area burned in the preceding six years. Indigenous populations are being disproportionately affected by this increased burning. In 2023, 42 percent of wildfire evacuations were from communities where more than half the population was Indigenous, according to Statistics Canada.
“There’s a clear need by these groups, and while there are markets that may be more lucrative for us, we can’t see a market that’s more important at this point in time,” Stewart said.
Gallagher said BackRoadIntel is in discussion with “several large brands” in BC to sponsor its efforts to get its equipment into more Indigenous communities, with the hope of creating a “network effect” and increasing the number of back roads authorities have visibility on.
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