Billionaire’s playground on California border gets secret weapon in fight against wildfires: ‘The worm’

Billionaire playgrounds get all the best toys.

Incline Village, the billionaire-packed Nevada enclave attracting wealthy Californians fleeing the state’s proposed wealth tax has a new line of defense against another threat: fires.

The North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District is deploying remote-controlled machines to chomp through potentially dangerous vegetation around the ritzy lakeside village as part of an unusually named wildfire mitigation and prevention effort dubbed “The Worm.”

Thanks in part to Nevada’s lack of individual income tax, the bougie nabe just minutes from California’s border has emerged as a magnate for deep-pocketed transplants, attracting the likes of Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Google co-founder Sergey Brin to Lake Tahoe.

The huge fuel-reduction project comes as the nearby Reno area has been ravaged by major wildfires for the past 10 days, with the Bug and Stallion fires scorching more than 120,000 acres and forcing thousands of residents from their homes.

The Worm, named for the long and skinny shape of the 176.5-acre treatment zone, snakes around neighborhoods in Incline Village, creating a buffer between homes and the thick surrounding forest.

Officials in the wealthy enclave are trying to deprive future fires of the vegetation fuel they need to explode.

Officials in the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District have brought in high-tech, remote-operated masticators from BurnBot to chew away the overgrown brush threatening nearby neighborhoods.

The equipment grinds dangerous vegetation down from up to 132 feet deep into public land alongside private yards.

“They have a much broader view of the area they’re treating,” BurnBot’s Tanya Soans told a local outlet. “It’s much lower impact on the environment, both because they can see where they are and also because it’s lighter.”

The operation is a joint effort between the Incline Village General Improvement District and state forestry officials via a “Better Together Nevada Shared Stewardship” grant.

Crews finished clearing 62.6 acres in July 2025, and are already dozens of acres deep into phase two, with plans to wrap up the full 176.5-acre perimeter by the middle of September.

The idea isn’t necessarily to stop a blaze dead in its tracks, but to rob it of its intensity, potentially producing less severe flames that firefighters have a better chance of extinguishing.

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