California’s recent wildfires, exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, have focused the nation’s attention on the problem of managing fire at the wildland urban interface. While the subject lies outside the scope of our main program priorities, we saw an opportunity to host a “Fire Immediate Response System” workshop (April 24 -26, 2019) as a special project, with the goal of understanding and generating a report on recommendations for how new or re-imagined technologies could improve early fire detection and response.
Recognizing the broad and complex scope of fire management, the meeting focused on analyzing the systems and technologies employed during the first period of fire response — the ‘Early Fire’ phase (immediate pre-wildfire to 24 hours post-ignition) — when critical decisions are made that shape the growth, spread and impact of the fire. We focused on the tools and resources available for assessing Early Fire, including real-time detection of ignition and fire perimeter growth, rapid assessment (sizeup) methods, immediate response (initial attack) methods to extinguish/manage the wildfire, chains of command, and decision support tools.
The workshop brought together 40 stakeholders with a broad range of expertise, including representatives from fire management groups, federal and state government agencies, non-government organizations, universities, and the private and philanthropic sectors.
Representatives from the firefighting community set the stage, providing insight into current fire response procedures and associated technology, and information and resource needs to support Early Fire assessment and response. Attendees then reviewed and evaluated current and planned capabilities for technology-based solutions including satellite, drone and ground-based fire detection.
Opportunities and challenges
A number of practical opportunities were identified for improving fire immediate response, involving some new technological and organizational capabilities including those in the private and defense sectors. Advances in data collection and numerical modeling were also identified that could enhance current assessments of fire risk and fire behavior. The group felt that much could be done to enhance fire immediate response with data and technology that are currently available but not yet harnessed.
With the pace of technological advancement (e.g., satellite, airborne and ground-based sensors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles), it was recognized that the fire management community needs help determining operational suitability, reliability and readiness of new technologies to support real-time decision making.
The attendees identified fragmentation in how technological solutions are deployed in Early Fire and agreed that no one entity is entirely responsible for managing wildfire in California. Although there is a common goal of reducing loss of life and property, different stakeholder communities have differing views on how best to achieve that goal, which has resulted in technological fragmentation; different organizations use different tools. Technological fragmentation appears to manifest both institutionally, with expertise often constrained to a single department or research group, and spatially—firefighters in Northern and Southern California use different data to predict where and how a fire will burn. The workshop surfaced a pressing need for a common, operational intelligence platform to bring together disparate sources of data and model output in real-time to support fire immediate response decision-making.
Additionally, ingrained, habitual, and traditional thinking are at least as potent obstacles to radical improvement in fire management as are the technical issues, and a longer-term strategy is needed to change perspectives on fire, such as the commonly held perspective that every wildfire demands response. A more selective response strategy based on contemporary principles of forest management and models of risk could undergird a more selective, scaled and strategically effective response system.
A shared, interoperable data platform, fully leveraging the data and technology of the day, would improve wildfire operations intelligence and coordination within and across agencies and could support significant near-term improvement. However, the group identified knowledge and data gaps in how we characterize and predict the spread of wildfires. For example, the current network of weather sensors failed to capture how hot and fast winds would blow through the complex topography around Paradise during the Camp Fire, and the resulting predictions underestimated the rapid rate of spread. As a result, it’s not yet clear that, even if there were clear communication between organizations, we currently understand fires well enough to stop the five percent of fires that are not contained.
Recommendations
How, then, can technological innovation fill these data, knowledge and institutional gaps to support the various organizations involved in immediate response? The workshop identified the following priorities and recommendations, which are described in detail in the report.
- Develop a shared, integrated platform for diverse sources of data, intelligence and information
- Conduct new wildfire risk assessments with high-resolution mapping technologies
- Improve scientific understanding of “megafires” through retrospective analysis
- Enhance fire behavior models and associated inputs for real-time prediction
- Perform a cost-benefit analysis of investment in solutions vs. reactive management
- Target investments in the development and adoption of new technologies
- Expand multi-stakeholder dialogue, collaboration and action
The goals of the recommendations above mirror those of fire management organizations: to preserve life and property, and to maintain healthy, resilient ecosystems. The current wildfire policy of extinguishing all fires allows fuels to accumulate. Along with a warming climate and inadequately scaled mitigation policies, the conditions are in place for repeated, severe and costly wildfires. The workshop elucidated the need to scale up preventative measures and to strike a new balance between resource allocation for near-term firefighting and long-term fuels management. Acting on the above priorities could help achieve these goals, supporting California’s ongoing efforts to improve resilience in its ecosystems, institutions and communities.
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