Why cant we just have drones with infrared cameras alert california fire authorities the second brush fires start?
In: Technology
The same reason it’s hard to find a lost boat on the ocean. There’s a lot of area to cover.
I’m not sure you understand just how much forest and brush there is. Like, through the Sierras, there’s a lot of places where you could walk in a straight line for a couple days, and not encounter any houses, roads, trails, or other signs of development. Covering all of the territory in any type of effective manner would take hundreds of drones. Even if you didn’t cover urban areas, and populated spaces, where people are likely to report fires quickly.
And that’s ignoring the man hours and resources spent chasing false positives.
Edit: really, pull up Google maps, and look towards the middle of Cali. You can probably skip the majority of the San Juaquin Valley, because it’s pretty populated. Every once in a long while, there’s a fire south of Bakersfield, before the grapevine. But it’s not often a big deal. But west of I5 is pretty sparsely populated until you get to the coast. Same thing about 20 miles east of 99 and into the Sierras. Whole lot of land, whole lot of flammable material. Not a lot of practical ways to keep an eye on it.
I’m going to go with cost and bureaucratic inertia.
Your plan makes a lot of sense, but like a lot of things that make sense in the real world, the problem is getting the right people to act. The Forestry Service wouldn’t have money in their budget for that kind of innovation, so they’d have to go to the State for the money. Now the problem becomes who is going to pay for it and what company is going to get the contract.
Now comes the real fun. Who is going to operate the drones? Civil Servants or private contractors. What level of training do they need?
We technically could but that would require a number of things which cost money.
1) A buttload of drones. California is huge. evn with each drone seeing several miles you would need thousands.
2) A base station of some sort. Either the drone needs to be able to automatically swap its battery without human intervention or there needs to be 10x as many drones to allow them time to recharge. Or maybe even a worker here to swap batteries every 5-30 minutes depending on the design.
3) Network connection for the base station. That is a lot of satellite internet or new network cables that need to be wired. For that matter….
4) Electricity. Lots of new powerlines have to be layed to cover every square mile of California. $$$$
5) Bad weather. Storms, rain, and even wind could destroy the drones or at least cause guidance or control issues causing them to fail to return to the automated base station requiring workers to constantly fix things.
6) An actual fire. To detect remote fires, you must be in remote places. These expensive base stations, the infrastructure, and all the drones would be destroyed when an actual fire happens.
7) depending on altitude this could be a hazard to other aircraft.
So, lots of problems. Most of them go away if you give up total coverage and give up real-time reporting. I’m quite sure someone somewhere is doing this on a small scale.
I’d go with a satellite. It can cover the whole US and can be automated to a higher degree, I think.
I think maybe satellite imagery would be more realistic, still that’s a lot of ground to cover.
They already do possible fire detection with satellites. You can even see the data in real time here: [https://fire.airnow.gov/](https://fire.airnow.gov/) The little orange suns are satellite hits (lots just south of SF by Big Basin), the little fires are confirmed, and the colored shapes show air quality. Zoom in to find them, and you can click them to see details.
Despite all the other reasons expressed, I think it might make sense, if it was effective enough to make it economical.
The answer may just be that drones capable of that are relatively new and no one else has thought of it yet.
Although, as has been pointed out, California is huge, a similar idea using satellites might be a better solution (if they’re capable of close enough resolution).
Some departments *do” use drones in fire detection:
https://www.cnet.com/news/californias-fires-face-a-new-high-tech-foe-drones/
The state also uses satellites, ground-based sensors, a lightning detection. More recently, they started using computational systems and machine learning to predict where fires will spread. (I know people who work in this computational side)
The thing is, these technologies are fairly new and need to prove themselves. You don’t just go and buy a drone system with magic IR fire detection technology– lots of the tech exists and can be adopted, but some of it doesn’t exist or doesn’t work well enough for a different purpose– you need to develop it or pay someone do develop it. That takes time, and needs to work within governmental budget cycles. The legislature needs to allocate the funding for that purpose, and they done just have endless money, and not all legislators are supportive of the idea of spending money on fire prevention or on new fangled ideas, especially if it’s for a different district.
If you have a budget, do you spend it on tried and true systems or do you bankroll the development and creation of new technology that may or may not meet th goals?
You may be underestimating how large and mountainous California is. Mountains are not good places for drones. Many remote places.
They already use the MODIS and VIIRS satellite images to map fires 24/7. The problem is that when conditions are bad, a single match dropped on dry grass can turn into a 1,000 acre fire in an hour or two, and it takes time to mobilize fire crews and begin fighting. Additionally there are often conditions (both atmospheric and topographic) which can make it extremely difficult or impossible to fight, at which point they just try to contain the damage until conditions improve. That’s why they often predict it will be weeks or months until a fire is contained.
When conditions are more favorable, countless fires are reported and suppressed, and you just don’t hear about them. It’s only the one in 1,000 that makes the news.
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