Saramatonto, California (AP) – Firefighters and firefighters have become increasingly dangerous in the western United States in recent years, and firefighters have been trying to be smarter when preparing firefighters.
California’s 4% record last year is using new technology and better resource allocation to prevent small fires from escalating into mega-fires. About Oregon, about half the size of Rhode Island.
Compared to the previous year, there were 730 more fires in California, an increase of about 16%. But the area burned about three times – 470 square miles (1,200 square miles).
Prompt handling of fires provides a good opportunity to keep firefighters small.
That includes using computer modeling of new fire features to assess hazards before they start and then plan their course and progress.
Assessing “Critical Weather” – Hot, Dry Winds or Lightning Storms – The technology allows California planners to pre-position firefighters, bulldozers, airplanes, shovels, and chain tools. Areas where you can respond more quickly.
Lynn Tolmahoff, a spokesman for the California Fire Protection Agency, said that computer modeling “can be used to plan daily events across the country.”
That caliber helped keep 95% of fires up to 10 acres (4 ha) or less. So far this year, 96.5% of fires have occurred in less than 10 hectares (4 ha).
Federal firefighters are similarly monitoring how dry vegetation is in some areas, followed by station staff and equipment in areas where people gather before or after a hurricane, said Stantan Floreia, a spokeswoman for the Boys, Idaho National Interaction Fire Center. .
At other times, man-made firefighting towers have been replaced by cameras in remote areas, many of which are equipped with high-quality and artificial intelligence to identify the chimney coming out of the morning mist. There are 800 such cameras scattered throughout California, Nevada, and Oregon, and even ordinary viewers can actually see fires from a distance in real time.
Firefighters can then begin to make tactical decisions based on what they have seen – even Tolmachof said before firefighters arrived.
Firefighters routinely call in the National Guard or the Air Force to deploy fire at night, using thermal imagery to mark their borders and hot spots. You can use satellite imagery to plot smoke and ash.
“Your job is to manage the fires, and they are the tools to help you do that,” said Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College in California and a well-known wildfire policy expert. .
In California, firefighters can provide all of that information on forest management, infrastructure planning and wildfires, flooding, tsunamis, and landslides that can help you make decisions. Then, depending on the weather and other variables, they add a fire simulation to the computer simulation.
Other mapping software can show active fires, fuel breaks designed to delay their spread, ordered fires, patrols around homes, damaged homes and other fires.
“Everything is still new, but we can see where it will take us in the future when it comes to planning for people to build houses in the wild,” Tolmachoff said.
Former firefighter and now Oregon State University professor John Bailey Cal Fire and other fire agencies were the recipients of remote imaging and other technologies that could have been key to the previous fire investigation.
Some experts point to global warming, deforestation, and forest fires, which once swept into overcrowded areas. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier for the past 30 years, and scientists have long warned that the world will be much warmer when it warms up.
However, firefighters’ goal is to replicate the effects of Monday’s wildfires in the Topanga Canyon community between Los Angeles and Malibu.
It could spread quickly with a dry brush, but it was captured in 7 acres (3 acres) after minutes of drone drone strikes in LA and neighboring Ventura County.
What firefighters do not want is another fire in the Malibu area in 2018. It destroyed more than 1,600 buildings, killed three people, and displaced thousands.
In another bid, California is buying dozens of new Sikorsky Firehawk helicopters – $ 24 million each – for overnight, fast-moving, and more powerful U.S. UH-1H firefighters during the Vietnam War. Hughs will eventually be replaced.
In addition, it will soon receive seven military surplus C-130 transport aircraft designed to carry 4,000 gallons (15,140 liters) of firefighting, three times the size of Cal Fire Air S-2.
For all of that, firefighters’ efforts to extinguish and extinguish fires are likely to be delayed if they are to be postponed, says Richard Minich, a professor at Riverside.
No matter how sophisticated the technology, they say, there are few areas where they can control or influence things. We are above ourselves, you can have all the technologies in the world – fire control is impossible.
He said it is more practical to work with forest fires to use new burnt sheets to spread new fires.
Former federal firefighter and now firefighters United Nations-led Safety, Ethics and Ecology Timothy Engelsby said firefighters must follow a new approach when jumping on dangerous fires in a mile or more. From the main fire hazard.
He said it would be better to build more fire-resistant houses and provide less resources to protect vulnerable communities.
“We have these amazing tools that allow us to capture real-time fires and better forecast weather forecasts,” Inglesby said. Using that technology, we can be more systematic and work to keep people safe, secure homes, and start working with fire, but we can make fire work – that is, recycling all the dead.
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Keith Ridler, co-author of Christopher Weber in Boys, Idaho, and Los Angeles, contributed to this story.
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