Comment by micro_cam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by micro_cam | Hacker News Reader

I'm very intrigued by the potential for new wildfire tech but as someone who lives in wildfire land in Montana i have my doubts about this video... detecting putting out a campfire is a pretty idealized case.

Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc

The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out.

I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.

You have some good points and questions here. I spent 3 summers as a wildland fire fighter and have seen lightening strikes/small fires up to massive 100k acre affairs. I will speak from that experience, but keep in mind it was over a decade ago and it's been a while since I had to think about any of this.

As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive.

You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area.

You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land?

You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews.

Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.

Great points especially about needing to actually cut trees. I've never been on a fire crew though friends and family members have been hot shots and tanker pilots.

I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.

I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.

About the 40 acres, I forgot to link the article where the 40 acre claim is made: https://www.businessinsider.com/startups-working-to-fight-wi...

Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.

A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.

Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.

It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.

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