HACKER Q&A
📣 Viralsneezer

Why can't wildfires be stopped small?


hy can't this be implemented immediately: Detect a wildfire / bushfire almost as soon as the first sparks occur. My understanding is that satellites that can do this are already in place. It should not be too difficult to apply this available realtime data to stopping fires very quickly after they are detected, while they are very small. Automatically generate alerts and trigger launch of firefighting helicopters / drones to douse within a few minutes of detection ... Use chemical fire-stopping bombs to kill every wildfire while it is still very small AI to predict rate and direction of expansion of fire based on weather-station data [ambient temperatures, humidity, wind speed and direction, and realtime satellite thermographic analysis - to predict rate and direction of fire growth).

  👤 tgflynn Accepted Answer ✓
One question I have about your idea is how small is small ?

If your detection threshold is too low you'll be dispatching drones to people's campfires or grills. If it's much larger than that the fire will be too big for any drones that currently exist and/or are approved for use in the airspace to extinguish.

There's also the issue of how quickly a fire can spread. Unless you have a very dense network of firefighting assets ready to deploy at a moment's notice the fire may be too big for them to put out by the time they arrive at the scene.

👤 op03
High wind speeds can make it spread over acres in minutes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018)

Also air units had to wait around till sunrise.

👤 mtmail
Example for wildfire detection using ML https://samsammurphy.users.earthengine.app/view/hotmap by https://twitter.com/samsammurphy His startup is http://www.earthscope.io/
👤 ktpsns
This is done since 80 years. People doing that are called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokejumper

Of course it would be nice to have robots doing the job, being faster, stronger and more fire proof then humans.