California deploys AI-powered wildfire detection systems
latimes.com
latimes.com
In this case:
Cal Fire’s mission is to suppress 95 percent of all fires when they are 10 acres or less.
It sounds as if total suppression remains California's official fire-management policy and protocol.
I can understand how this is desirable during peak fire season (though increasingly there is no such thing as "fire season", only "fire years"), but without permitting or initiating limited burns, the past two decades' history of every-increasingly large and ferocious wildfires is destined to continue.
As for the AI component: our human senses work best by utilising multiple senses. For wildfire detection, identifying smoke in visual imagery is helpful (and the figure of 90% coverage for fire-prone wildlands was another sobering trivium from this article), but cross-validating against other data, say, infrared thermal imaging to correlate smoke-like images with actual heat-on-the-ground would be useful. That spy-satellite remote sensing is being brought to bear is another interesting revelation here.
no, CalFIRE was excoriated after the 2017 season. The upper management including the Chief were.. uh... "fired"
Meanwhile, a Sacramento appointee with some connection to the native population has to sit in committee meetings for the last five years, while very very slow changes are made. The political class in California wants to extract votes at every meeting, so they emphasize "first people" every third sentance.
The truth of the situation is clear to many, but the allegiance is bound to institutional goals and ever-scarce funding. Many detailed references available on request
There's the possibility that the NY Times got this factoid wrong, though it's precisely the sort of comment I'd expect to be fact-checked prior to publication. Assuming the comment is accurate, it's a current documented statement that strongly suggests (near) total fire suppression along the lines of the US Forest Service's notorious "10 AM policy" (all reported fires should be extinguished completely by 10 AM the following day) remains in effect.
I'd much appreciate seeing your further references.
The NYT account is confirmed.
First to say, the land across California is split in ownership and management between US Federal Agencies in total, the State of California, private companies for commercial use - importantly timber and electrical power, and other uses. Historically the slow-moving majority-owner Federal Forest management emphasized the value of forests as a crop by charter, leading to the now-infamous density and fire-abatement policies lasting well into the 21st century.
Things changed quite a lot legally in the aftermath of the 2017 catastrophic wildfire season that wiped out a third of a city, Santa Rosa, just North-East of San Francisco. The 2017 year's wildfire totals were +1.5 million acres. Only later to be exceeded in 2021, including the Dixie Fire "in Butte, Plumas, Lassen, Shasta, and Tehama counties started on July 13, burned a total of 963,309 acres, destroyed 1,329 structures and damaged 95 additional structures." (oddly, part of which was via arson by a CA college Police Criminology professor named Gary Stephen Maynard )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire
A legal document was drafted and signed, that resolved the cost and authority imbalances between four Federal and State Agencies under Governor Newsom. Next, by order N-05-19 from the Office of the California Governor (among many such orders), State Agencies and stakeholders are required to respond in writing, and on a regular basis, on what is being done.
https://wildfiretaskforce.org/
https://energysafety.ca.gov/what-we-do/wildfire-safety-advis...
The political document in effect now from Gov. Newsom / Sacramento is called:
california wildfire and forest resilience action plan_2021.pdf
There is more to say on the topic of management and liability, but let's move on..
High-tech constantly seeks to sell products to government, but actual progress is sometimes backwards in practice. This time, real advances were made.. for example:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-the-...
Please recall that the largest wildfire in the history of the State of New Mexico, was a controlled burn gone wrong.. very wrong..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/17/new-mexico-...
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1099625787/new-mexico-wildfir...
https://losalamosreporter.com/2022/05/05/rep-leger-fernandez...
The reigning academic heavyweight for Forestry and California Forestry, is Dr Scott Stephens, with well-over 100 publications on the topic. Reading a little more deeply, you might find a man who knows how to navigate between the powers that be, as well as do science.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nlwR8igAAAAJ&hl=en...
Current firefighting policy for public consumption might be found (somewhere) here
>https://www.fire.ca.gov/our-impact
Right at the top of the page.
"CAL FIRE aggressively fights fire, with the goal of keeping 95% of fires contained at 10 acres or less."
Seems very clear to me.
I appreciate mistrial9's extended remarks, I'm going through their links and references, and again want to emphasize that I understood policy to be OTHER than total containment.
Both the NYT's account and CalFire's own policy page ... strongly suggest otherwise.
Caveats in my original comment here notwithstanding, I'm disappointed.
This is who is actually doing the project:
And here is a better overview of the program (imo):
https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/cal-fire-equips-art...
That program is coordinated out of the University of Nevada.
Why did not they go with a simple approach:
* Device with a low power thermal sensor, cellular connection and a battery that sends a heart beat with the current temperature once every minute or so. Maybe even BLE mesh network of such sensors. Simple patterns like a sudden increase in the are or sensors going offline can indicate something is happening.
* Does it really need a live video? Time-lapse would require less traffic and energy. Many camera's seems to be attached to the existing poles or lines and potentially limiting coverage area.
* I think a modern approach for such projects should be: put streams from sensors of different types online + an archive of data and have it as an ongoing kaggle-like competition for the best approach with the condition that resulting model should be made available to CalFire for their own use.
I'm not sure what is simple about needing to deploy orders of magnitude more devices to achieve similar levels of coverage...
It would make sense to me that nonzero, predictable, acceptable maintenance is better than a plan for zero maintenance which, if it fails, would leave you with more devices than you can possibly fix.
i.e. it doesn't work when it's so dry that the leaf canopies are igniting.
Though technically, this is machine learning and not AI.
Many healthy ecosystems in California require fire - there is no mention of what will happen post-detection but if this is just a quicker way to extinguish fires, it will be a net negative long term by increasing the fuel load even higher.
Edit: I see this now: "[. . .] as they will be quickly extinguished while still small." Putting out fires quickly is not going to help us long term. We need to develop ways to proactively burn areas safely.