Fighting wildfires is going high-tech

Last December, farmers were burning dry vines in a vineyard in Deli Mar Moussa, a hill town more than a dozen miles east of Beirut. It is known for its monastery built in the 18th century and its pine forest. This is usually dangerous, given Lebanon’s hot, dry climate, where a spark can quickly turn into a large fire.

But on this day, the worst was avoided. A device made by a German start-up company could “smell” smoke from farm fires and issue an alarm, allowing authorities to prevent it from spreading. Given the recent explosion of wildfires around the world caused by global warming, rapid detection is needed now more than ever.

In this case, Dryad Networks’ device called Silvanet identified a distinctive gas pattern in the air that indicated something was burning in Deli Mar Moussa.

As average global temperatures rise and climate change continues, wildfires are becoming more devastating, destroying communities and releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Burning leaves and underbrush can go undetected for hours or even days before the smoke is reported to authorities by witnesses or passing aircraft.

Many forest fires smolder long before they erupt, opening the door for new generations of smoke detection equipment. Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Dryad, calls him an “electronic nose.” “If you get to the scene of a bushfire when it’s small, there’s a lot more you can do than if you find it when it’s two, three or five hectares in size,” he says. “It’s very difficult to contain at that point.”

And as a logical extension of this, the emerging industry is already making plans for squadrons of firefighting drones, which may one day be stationed among the trees, waiting for a signal to extinguish the fires before they spread. .

Each year, wildfires destroy an additional 23,000 square miles of forest than in 2001, an area slightly larger than Croatia. Such fires kill hundreds of people each year and leave nearly half a million more homeless or displaced.

Each wildfire releases dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere that can increase the likelihood of illness and death for people hundreds or even thousands of miles away. A study published in October estimated that more than 10,000 more people died each year from wildfire smoke in the 2010s than in the 1960s.

And of course, the more smoke there is, the worse global warming becomes. Last year’s wildfires in Canada released about 640 million tonnes of carbon, more than the annual fossil fuel emissions of any country except China, the United States and India, according to a study published in the journal Nature. .

Since 2001, carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires have skyrocketed by 60%. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the destruction they cause to fauna and vegetation can have dire consequences for ecosystems and the scorched landscapes left behind.

Brinkschulte, a veteran German telecommunications executive, realized that existing detection methods were not keeping up in 2018, when wildfires were particularly prevalent. Satellites can detect wildfires from space, and cameras can survey prone areas, but in both cases large enough to produce a visible plume of smoke or flames to break through the forest canopy. fire must already have occurred.

Brinkschulte said he wanted to create a system that would detect fires before they spread, with a “scalable and sustainable business model.” Dryad’s Silvanet sensor is equipped with a metal oxide semiconductor layer that reacts with gases in the air.

According to Brinkschulte, the presence of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and other gases, such as in the early stages of a fire, changes the electrical resistance of the sensor and forms a specific “fingerprint.” AI analyzes gas composition in real time. Dryad said the system allows users to locate the source of a fire within a 320-foot radius of each device.

Mr. Dryad is not alone in this field. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has installed sensors made by Rockville, Maryland-based N5.

The facility, called N5SHIELD, is currently located across the Hawaiian island of Maui, which suffered devastating fires last year. Silvanet is the company’s core product, with over 20,000 sensors shipped to date. Each retails for less than $100, but customers must also pay a service fee to access the company’s cloud-based platform.

The company says it has more than 100 customers in 20 countries, and most of its buyers are local governments and municipalities. In the United States, Cal Fire is testing 400 Dryad sensors at Jackson Demonstration State Forest, about 260 miles north of San Francisco.

However, one concern with sensor technology is accuracy. Being too sensitive can lead to false alarms. And while networks of individual detectors tied to trees are useful on hiking trails across forested areas where fires are common, or along power lines, they are less effective elsewhere. Cameras are needed to quickly detect small fires over large areas.

Tourette-sur-Loup, a village in southern France, recently tested a special camera developed by a Polish company called SmokeD. The device takes a photo every few seconds and uses AI to simultaneously compare each photo as part of a continuous surveillance system.

However, cameras require significant infrastructure such as elevated mounting points and constant power supply, all of which limit scalability, especially in remote locations. Additionally, the equipment itself is a fire hazard.

But new satellite technology is coming online that could be even more useful in detecting fires that are difficult for orbiting platforms to reach. Traditional satellite systems often struggle to detect wildfires in their early stages. This is because geostationary satellites must be tens of thousands of miles above the equator, limiting their ability to capture images with sufficient resolution.

Satellites in low Earth orbit can capture high-resolution images, but they cannot scan the same parts of the Earth frequently enough. What is needed is a large number of satellites capable of capturing useful images of the same location, says Christopher Van Arsdale, head of climate and energy at Google Research.

In September, Van Arsdale’s team unveiled FireSat, a dedicated satellite constellation designed to detect small fires on a global scale. By 2028, FireSat says it plans to deploy a constellation of 52 satellites equipped with thermal infrared sensors that can identify potential fires in nearly all weather conditions.

“It’s not detection that’s a game-changer, it’s the ability to change how fires are managed.”

The company says the high-resolution images of the entire planet are updated every 20 minutes, and the system can capture fires anywhere the size of a school classroom within that time frame. The first satellite is scheduled to be launched early next year.

Another German startup called OroraTech is working on a similar system. Thomas Grübler, chief strategy officer and co-founder of OroraTech, said the company has already launched two satellites and the goal is to launch 98 more by 2028. With 100 satellites, the company says it would be able to detect 13 bytes of satellites. – 13-foot shots will be fired around the world within 30 minutes.

Grübler envisions a world where data is combined with FireSat to provide “even faster detection capabilities.”

Dryad hopes to move beyond detection to actual firefighting and launch autonomous drones to respond to fires like the one that nearly broke out in Deli Mar Moussa. “We are in a unique position to detect fires very early, and drones have the potential to extinguish them,” Brinkschulte said.

In areas where wildfires occur regularly, drones using new fire suppression technology could be deployed to ensure a rapid and automated response.

Startups all seem to agree that using a combination of these different technologies is the best way to go. Kate Dargan, senior advisor for the Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative, said the data from the satellites can inform future mitigation and protection measures. “It’s not detection that’s a game-changer, it’s the ability to change the way fires are managed,” she says.

But Michael Walla, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, cautions against focusing too much on fire detection technology.

There is no doubt that early and accurate detection can help suppress certain fires, but only if you have the resources to use the information effectively. Also, under the right conditions, such as strong winds, a fire can spread no matter how early it is discovered. “No matter how quickly you discover it, some fires don’t change tactics or outcomes,” he says.

And more broadly, while detection technology can help extinguish slow-spreading fires, Wala cautioned that rapidly-spreading fires can attract more vegetation, which can accelerate fire spread. There is.

If we’re going to deploy these satellite technologies, cameras and sensors, we also need to invest in burn control, he says. “The risk is to focus too much on detection, but not overlook mitigation and prevention,” Walla says.

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