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How firefighters are leveraging artificial intelligence technology to detect wildfires faster than humans

CAL FIRE personnel are using artificial intelligence to detect wildfires.

The technology has been developed using the University of California, San Diego's Alert California wildfire cameras. It has been deployed across all 21 CAL FIRE dispatch centers across the state, including here in Southern California.

Here's how it works: Artificial intelligence, which has been trained on hundreds of petabytes of data, is used in conjunction with wildfire cameras. The wildfire cameras take images every two minutes and detects changes in the image, like moving wildfire smoke.

The AI has been trained to look for these plumes of smoke. If it detects something that could be a smoke column, it alerts a team that there might be a fire. Sometimes, these are false hits, like a cloud of dust or passing clouds. But other times, it could be a fire – and that's when it's sent into a different category, called anomalies.

Both dispatch centers and intelligence centers, like the Interagency Operations Center in Riverside, are alerted to the potential anomaly. A human at these centers will then determine the location and if it appears to be a fire or not. They use a variety of other tools, including other cameras, heat-detecting satellites, and boots on the ground to help make this judgment.

At the Interagency Operations Center, Intelligence Officer Teresa Babin-Lincoln is one of the humans that work to gather intelligence on these possible fires.

Gesturing to her computer screen, showing a red box around a possible smoke plume, she explains, "This little square, we can start zooming in ... So this little red box is what it's decided is smoke and needs a second set of eyes. These cameras can see a really long way ways, much further than a human eye can."

Late last year, a wildfire in Orange County was detected exclusively using this technology, which was recounted in an Orange County Fire Authority Facebook post.

According to CAL FIRE officials, the first time this happened in the state was in 2023, just a month after CAL FIRE's San Diego Unit (SDU) deployed the system at its dispatch center. In 2024, 1,668 fires were detected in this manner.

Fire officials say the technology is an important tool that helps them detect fires early, long before humans may notice in remote areas at odd hours of the day.

"Just due to the amount of cameras in the state of California, there's no way humans can accomplish that. And [the cameras] provide 24-hour coverage, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to a lot of remote areas, areas humans wouldn't be anyway," explains Battalion Chief Travis Lemm, who works closely with the technology.

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Gavin Nguyen

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