The Big Blowup
In the summer of 1910, a man named Edward Pulaski was a Forest Service ranger in Wallace, Idaho. He was forty-three years old. A former miner and surveyor. He had been fighting fires in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest since August 19.
On the evening of August 20, the wind changed.
Hurricane-force winds merged individual fires into a single continental conflagration. Three million acres burned across Idaho and Montana in two days. Eighty-five people died. Most of them were firefighters. It remains the largest wildfire in recorded American history.
Forty-five men. One decision.
The fire exploded around Pulaski's crew. He made a decision in minutes: a mine tunnel he knew about, two miles away, was the only shelter that might survive what was coming.
He led forty-five men through burning forest to the Nicholson adit.
By the time they reached it, several men were trying to run. Pulaski understood the panic was reasonable. He also understood it was lethal.
He stood at the tunnel entrance with his service revolver and told the men that anyone who ran would be shot.
He did not intend to shoot anyone. He intended to save everyone, and panic was the mechanism most likely to kill them.
The men went in. Pulaski worked at the entrance, beating out flames with his hat, pouring water from a nearby ditch onto the portal timbers to keep them from igniting. He worked until he collapsed from smoke inhalation.
When he regained consciousness, the fire had passed. He called into the darkness:
"Are the men still alive?"
A voice from inside answered: "Yes, but barely."
The cost
Pulaski survived, but he was permanently blinded in one eye. His lungs never fully recovered. The Forest Service initially proposed to deny his disability claim on procedural grounds.
A national outcry forced a reversal.
The tool
During his recovery, Pulaski designed a firefighting implement that combined an axe and an adze in a single head, allowing a firefighter to both chop and grub with one tool. He manufactured the first prototypes himself.
The Forest Service adopted it in 1913. It became the standard wildland firefighting tool in America.
It remains so today.
It is called a Pulaski. Every wildland firefighter in America carries one. Most of them know the name. Some of them know the story behind it.
A man who held forty-five panicking men in a mine tunnel at gunpoint, and then, during his recovery, designed a better axe because there was still work to do.
2026
Why this name
We named this app after the tool because the tool was born the same way the app was.
A man who wasn't an engineer designed something because the people around him needed it. No budget. No team. No credentials. Just the problem and the will to solve it.
The app
Pulaski is an emergency evacuation notification and accountability system. Residents download the app, register their household address, and indicate if they have livestock or need assistance. During a wildfire or emergency, the sheriff's office selects an area on a map, sends an alert to everyone in the radius, and residents report back: evacuated, evacuating, or need help.
It was built for the Custer County Sheriff's Office in South Dakota. Population 2,043. When wildfires threatened the county, the department had no system to track who was out, who was still in, and who needed a ride. There was no budget for one.
The sheriff called the only guy in town he thought might know a developer.
He called a tour guide.
The builder
Luke Alvarez is a NOLS Wilderness First Responder, National Cave Rescue Commission operator (NSS-CRO), and SAR team leader for Custer County Search and Rescue. He led emergency coordination during the Custer wildfire. He has no computer science degree. He had never written a line of code before last winter.
He sat in his garage every morning and built Pulaski with Claude Code and YouTube. The same hands that run a chainsaw on a fire line wrote the code that tracks who gets out alive.
Built for the people who run toward the fire. Named after the man who wouldn't let them run away.