A little later 6:25 AM On November 8, 2018, a 911 broadcaster received a fire from a fire near Poe Dam in northern California. Nineteen minutes later firefighters saw what will become known as the Camp Fire. Drought dried plants in the area, and strong winds blew toward Paradise, a city 10 miles to the southeast. “This has potential for a major incident,” fire chief Matt McKenzie reported back to Incident Command.
An hour later hot brazers rained on the south side of paradise, igniting stained fires in front of the main front. Within 40 minutes from the first place, the main fire front reached the city. The camp fire would go on to burn for another two weeks, destroying paradise and killing 85 people. It is, along with the recent the -fires, one of the most expensive wild fires in American history.
The speed and devastation of recent wildfires have focused attention to early detection – the hope that igniting fire shortly after it will turn on will give firefighters enough time to push it away before it becomes uncontrollable. Cameras, satellites and tree-mounted sensors are all called as ways to identify coats of arms as they begin, but firefighters warn that early detection has their limits-and that in some cases no amount of early detection can stop the worst fires of control .
As happened with the camp fire, 911 calls still make up the majority of first detections, says Marcus Hernandez, Deputy Prime Minister at the California Department of Forest and Fire Fire Protection Technology -Research and Development. CAL Fire also uses Alertcalifornia, a network of more than 1.144 high -definition cameras across the state, which can be seen up to 60 miles during the day and 120 miles at night. The camera network is based on UC San Diego and is controlled by fireworks at command and control centers throughout the state.
By mid -2023, Alertcalifornia added the ability to automatically detect smoke columns from its camera film using AI. “Only the situational awareness that comes from those strategically located cameras was already an advantage before the giant jump forward related to AI -Aanomal detection,” says Hernandez. CAL Fire also uses a system called Fireguard, which uses military satellites to detect heat from wild fires. “That just points to us to check our other tools to find out if there is fire or not. We will automatically send.”
Dryad Networks, a boot -based in Germany, wants to improve early wild detection by fitting trees with distant sensors that can detect wild smoke. “It’s a cheap, solar -powered gas sensor, like an electronic nose. It’s like what you have in your home on the ceiling, but it has ai there and wireless communications built in,” says Carsten Brinkschulte, co -founder and director general of the company .
According to Brinkschulte, each device costs around $ 104 and can protect around a hectare from a forest. California alone has about 13 million hectares from a forest, but Brinkschulte says that his company wants to focus on much smaller, high risky areas where wild fires are more inclined to begin. Areas of interest to Dryad include nearby train lines, roads, walking roads and electricity lines that have been linked to more than 3,600 California wilderness Since 1992, including the camp fire.
