PETALUMA -- Nearly a quarter of the staff members at Sonoma Technology in Petaluma are fired up -- about fire.
The company, with about 70 employees, studies smoke patterns and fire fuel abatement at the forefront of a scientific discipline that is less than a decade old. As a result, the work is fun and exciting; employees feel that they’re part of important discovery, which makes for ebullience and high morale.
“A lot of our projects are interdisciplinary,” said Tami Haste, a senior air quality scientist at Sonoma Technology. Work teams shift and change based on the project, which keeps the workplace fresh.
“I’m working on a lot of the tools and models we’re using to predict” where smoke will go from wildfires and prescribed fires, said Sean Raffuse, an engineer manages the fire and fuels science group at the company. “My focus is on smoke, on the research side,” said Mr. Raffuse, whose enthusiasm for the science is infectious. He tracks smoke as it moves nationally, using remote sensing data on fires from NASA satellites.
Sonoma Technology, now with about $10 million in revenue, started more than 30 years ago to study air pollution. Lyle Chinkin, a meteorologist, is Sonoma Technology’s president. Mr. Chinkin notes that Sonoma Technology helps the government predict where smoke will travel so it can warn people in advance, especially “the elderly or children with asthma. You would know that smoke is coming that day.”
The team members are proud of what they do. “It’s powerful software,” Mr. Chinkin said. “The science and technology are really powerful. People really do get affected by this.”
That function of predicting smoke also contributes to employees’ sense of mission -- helping people. “Smoke affects public health,” Mr. Raffuse said.
Stacy Drury a fire ecologist at Sonoma Technology, studies fire behavior and helps to shift fires from being highly destructive to being productive and useful for clearing a forest of brush to make room for new growth. He, too, shares an intellectual aliveness that permeates the company’s culture.
