Updated Firefighting Technology Needs to Spread Like Wildfire

It’s summer 2019 and Chase Masterson is on his first fire. He is a 19-year-old college student working as a wildlands firefighter for the summer. Earlier in the day, Masterson and his crew were deployed to fight a raging forest fire in Northern California. They set up on a hill and look for anything that smokes. Half the men around have no experience. Small fires start to sprout up. Firefighters with shovels and pickaxes attack the flames. Multiple small fires combine into an inferno engulfing the hill. The temperature rises until it becomes unbearable. Visibility is reduced to 5 feet and no one can breathe. The crew’s leader gives the order to fall back. From the base of the hill, they watch as the pristine hill they were on turns to ash. 

Masterson shares his stories of excitement and danger from his room in the Oregon State Acacia Fraternity. He is an Oklahoma native and retains his accent. A blonde curling mullet falls to his shoulders. Above his desk is a flag with the phrase “don’t tread on me”.

Living Like Cavemen

When asked what technology they use to do the job, Masterson lists a variety of a shovel and pickaxes commonly used by landscapers. Occasionally they will bring a chainsaw with them, but it is heavy, cumbersome and requires assistants to carry cans of gasoline. The crew leader and medic have a radio to communicate with the commanders. When they signal a helicopter for a water drop, they use brightly colored flags or mirrors. Masterson describes that they are out there for days “living like cavemen.”

A serious lack of technology is being utilized by these firefighters. Their counterparts in the air don’t fare much better. The helicopters being utilized are Hueys and Air Cranes which were designed in the sixties. When dropping water on a target, the pilots use eyesight to judge when to release the payload.

Each year, fires become more destructive burning millions of acres and destroying thousands of homes. Entire communities like Paradise, California are devastated. In 2018, 85 Paradise residents were killed and “more than 11,000 houses burned to the ground” (Siegler). While air crews are utilizing multi-million dollar aircraft to fight fire, the ground crews are using the same technology that has been used for a hundred years. With fires on the rise, firefighters need an upgrade in technology.

“Nothing can prepare you for what it’s really like…”

The ground crews deploy several strategies to fight fire. The first is extinguishing hotspots, these refer to zones on the ground that are hot to the touch, whether smoking or ablaze. They are mostly caused by falling embers or vegetation that is still burning. Masterson explains how they use their shovels and hoes to dig up cool dirt to smoother the hot spots. Another method is to dig a fire line. This involves preemptively removing anything that can burn in the path of a fire. When the wall of fire reaches the fire line, there is always the risk that it could jump it. The firefighters spread out in watching lines to quickly respond to any threats. The entire time they communicate by voice and locate hotspots by eye.

Before they go into action, ground crews receive a small amount of training. They learn first aid and how to use their equipment. Strategies of extinguishing hot spots are practiced. Masterson explains that “the training was helpful but nothing can prepare you for what it’s really like”.

“Goodwin Fire 6/30/17” by Prescott NF is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Send in the Drones!

Logan Ross is 22 years old from Oregon State University who, like Masterson, was deployed over the summer. During a fire in St. Maries, Idaho, drones were employed by firefighters to locate hotspots. He explained how “every morning we had a briefing… and (the planners) showed us a map with hotspots circled on it”. Every hot spot was now visible to the commanders and they could direct units accordingly. Ross went on to say “the only issue with the drones was that sometimes things would light up that weren’t actually hotspots and this made our day harder. An example he gave was a rock soaking up the sun. The drones were vital in allowing them to safely do their job. They could have prevented Masterson from having to evacuate the hill on his first day by spotting hotspots before they did.

“Type 1 helicopter” by Intermountain Region US Forest Service is licensed under CC PDM 1.0

Eyes in the Sky

The firefighters of the sky play a major role in the overall strategy. “Helicopters and airtankers are extremely effective at fire suppression means, but they are also very expensive” (Gale). David Bergin has been flying since he was an officer in the Army in the eighties. Since then he has been flying for contract companies such as Erickson Air Crane and is now a lead pilot with Siller Helicopters. He has been fighting fires since the late nineties. Helicopters carry thousands of gallons of water and can extinguish large areas that are ablaze.
The training pilots receive is more extensive than the ground crews. When Bergin started working for contract companies, there was no training for firefighting. “The Forest Service requires us to be certified. It’s part knowledge part experience. They want to know you’re not up there creating a hazard”. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to have a helicopter in the air making training opportunities scarce. Most of the practice pilots have dropping water on targets happens on the job.

The major challenges that helicopter pilots face is coordinating with the ground crews. Bergin prefers to be signaled with a mirror but mentions that many ground crews can’t use them effectively. “It speeds things up if we can find them quickly”. There is always an aircraft acting as an air observer and taking requests from ground crews. “It’s fifty-fifty between requests and personal discretion. We’re told to keep it in check.”

The need for technology

Drones are already being utilized for firefighting. They provide important information to the commanders. Researchers have been experimenting with how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize this process and make decisions independent from human interaction. “The primary task for decision-making is to diagnose the situation based on the monitoring data… and then respond appropriately” (Zharikova). Swarms of drones could survey the area and provide instantaneous information on how to proceed to the commanders. “The system uses a heterogeneous team of UAV to fire detecting and monitoring as well as a ground command center to perform analysis, diagnosis and prognosis functions.” This would give a clear picture of the fire and how to fight it. An observation helicopter wouldn’t be necessary and could instead contribute to fighting the fire. Bergin says that “If it can identify things that need attention that would be ideal” 

Drones could even one day replace helicopters. “swarm robotics (SR) is an approach to the self-coordination of large numbers of simple robots” (Innocente). Swarms of hundreds of drones could continuously drop water on a fire. On most fires today there are only a handful of helicopters being utilized at one time. Drones don’t have the limitation of a human pilot becoming fatigued or put them at risk. “Given the increasing severity and frequency of occurrence of wildfires and the hazardous nature of fighting their propagation, the use of disposable inexpensive robots in place of humans is of special interest” (Innocente).

Maybe one day drones will replace firefighters entirely. However, for the foreseeable future, manpower and helicopters are here to stay. Bergin expresses that “just because it’s a drone and new doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better.” The problem remains that firefighters need an urgent overhaul in information systems like better access to radios, GPS, and fire data. The destruction caused by fires is only going to continue to increase affecting more people each year. Firefighters like Masterson, Ross and Bergin have a demanding job and need all the help they can get. 

Work Cited

Innocente, Mauro S., and Paolo Grasso. “Self-Organising Swarms of Firefighting Drones: Harnessing the Power of Collective Intelligence in Decentralised Multi-Robot Systems.” Journal of Computational Science, vol. 34, 2019

Marchi, Enrico, et al. “Helicopter Activity in Forest Fire-Fighting: A Data Analysis Proposal.” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 234, 2006.

Siegler, Kirk. “The Camp Fire Destroyed 11,000 Homes. A Year Later Only 11 Have Been Rebuilt.” NPR, NPR, 9 Nov. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/777801169/the-camp-fire-destroyed-11-000-homes-a-year-later-only-11-have-been-rebuilt.

Zharikova, Maryna, and Vladimir Sherstjuk. “The Hybrid Intelligent Diagnosis Method for the MultiUAV-Based Forest Fire-Fighting Response System.” 2018 IEEE 13th International Scientific and Technical Conference on Computer Sciences and Information Technologies (CSIT), 2018