NO. 2 Kim Abrams, Petra (Construction)
From her home in Berkeley, California, Kim Abrams has had a front-row seat for the wildfires that climate change has made a perennial occurrence. The 44-year-old entrepreneur recalls feeling hopeless for weeks or months on end as the air around her filled with smoke and deposited soot on her walls. “I was living in a chimney every fire season, and my kid and I both have asthma,” says Abrams. “I was like, ‘You know what? I need to do something about this.’ ”
With the summers increasingly hot and dry in the western United States, a single spark can ignite a deadly blaze that rips through parched terrain, leaving charred homes and devastated families behind. In many cases, that spark has come from malfunctioning power lines. Utility companies have begun moving their lines underground to mitigate the problem. But, as Abrams learned after researching the issue, those projects have been progressing slowly because of the most basic
