ABC News reports on technology in wildland firefighting
“In many cases, we’re still fighting fire with sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks,” said Bill Gabbert.
Here are excerpts from an article published September 8 by ABC News.
As wildfires in California and beyond have grown larger and deadlier in recent years, some in the firefighting sector say the tools and technologies used to combat new blazes have not kept up with the impact of climate change’s fury.
“In many cases, we’re still fighting fire with sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks,” Bill Gabbert, who worked as a full-time firefighter for more than 30 years before becoming managing editor of the industry publication Wildfire Today, told ABC News. “Hand crews, using hand tools and chainsaws to remove the fuel on the edge of a fire so the fire burns up to that area where there is no fuel and then it stops spreading, that’s how we put out fires.”
Some major technological leaps, including computer modeling simulators have been made to help assist firefighters, but funding and bureaucratic hurdles in many cases have prevented their widespread adoption in communities that may need them. Meanwhile, a handful of entrepreneurs see the blank space as a ripe opportunity for new innovations they say can ultimately help save lives as the West now grapples with some of its largest fires ever recorded.
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Jon Heggie, a battalion chief at Cal Fire, told ABC News that many fire agencies in recent years have explored emerging technologies as a way to address issues that arise in firefighting, noting how Gov. Gavin Newsom of California put out a call for “innovative ideas” to create “cutting-edge firefighting technology” in fall 2019.
One of the results of this effort — and “really, the one that stands out,” according to Heggie — was the creation and adoption of a computer modeling service that predicts a fire’s spread developed by the Bellevue, Washington-based firm Technosylva.
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The software integrates weather, topography, fuel (combustable material) and more to “give us a real-time estimation of fire growth over a given period of time,” Heggie said.
“Anytime there is a fire started anywhere in California, a simulation is started so that the field commanders have that real-time information from the minute a fire starts,” he added. “It populates that fire based on where the fire was reported, that may not be accurate of where the fire actually is, so when the first arriving engines get on scene, they give a more updated report of location and then another report is generated and that will be more accurate.”
The data is critical for giving early evacuation notifications to communities that could be in the path of the fire, as well as for decision-making on how to best combat a blaze.
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