Wildfire Today

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Wildfire Today

Tag: technology

November 15 deadline for IAWF conference workshops

Author Kelly AnderssonPosted on Categories Fire behaviorTags , , ,

IAWF 7th fire behavior + fuels conferenceCall for Workshops at Boise — deadline is November 15

SEND YOUR PROPOSALS NOW:  Conference workshops will be scheduled for Monday, April 15 and Wednesday, April 17 at the 7th International Fire Behavior + Fuels Conference in Boise, Idaho.

Workshops provide a forum for researchers and other professionals working in wildland fire to discuss and exchange interests in fire. Conference workshops are an opportunity for technology transfer, ensuring that scientific and technological developments are accessible to a wider range of users who can use and develop them.

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Conference organizers are particularly interested in hosting technology-related workshops if you or your organization are working with new technology used in wildland fire, or using technology in new ways in fire. Workshops that were particularly well-received at previous conferences included one focused on Soil Moisture and Wildfire Prediction and another on Fire and Fuels Management Tools.

There will be a nominal registration fee for conference participants who attend workshops in April; this fee will cover the cost of meeting rooms, refreshments, and audio-visual equipment. Instructors will not be required to pay a fee.

The IAWF is now encouraging proposals for workshops. Please include in your proposal:

    • Workshop title
    • Names, affiliations, and emails of instructors
    • Short bio for each instructor, including qualifications related to the topic
    • Proposed duration (2, 4, 6 or 8 hours)
    • One-paragraph description of workshop
    • Minimum/maximum number of participants (if applicable)
    • Any special facility needs (e.g. LCD projector, computer lab, wifi)

7TH INTERNATIONAL FIRE BEHAVIOR + FUELS CONFERENCEEvaluation criteria include overall quality and the fit with respect to the conference topic: Fuel, fire and smoke: evolving to meet our climate challenge. 

The IAWF is interested in workshops that connect research and management. The workshops can also be used to discuss administrative techniques, challenges, and strategies, and may include roundtable brainstorming.

Deadline for proposals is November 15. Previous conferences are listed [HERE].

APPLY HERE

Questions? Contact Mikel Robinson at
execdir@iawfonline.org or (406)625-7059.

$11 million contest for innovation in fighting fire

Author Kelly AnderssonPosted on Categories ResearchTags , , , 7 Comments on $11 million contest for innovation in fighting fire

Best-selling author and futurist Peter Diamandis became frustrated in recent years with the “craziness” of constant wildfire alerts he’d received. But unlike most people, Diamandis has a Rolodex full of wealthy benefactors and politicians, along with experience with a solution he had used before: Create a contest.

On April 21 his group XPRIZE launched its latest contest: finding new ideas to detect and suppress wildfires.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) said the prize threshold includes detecting and suppressing a high-risk wildfire in 10 minutes or less, and pinpointing from space all fire ignitions across multiple states or countries — in 60 seconds. These are the challenges for innovators in XPRIZE Wildfire, a four-year, $11 million competition to develop and demonstrate fully autonomous capabilities to find and fight wildfires.

XPRIZE Wildfire

The United Nations, the White House, and Congress recently have prioritized destructive wildfires as a major economic, environmental, and safety threat. Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E, said they are co-sponsoring the project. “Today’s launch of XPRIZE Wildfire is a call-to-action to entrepreneurs, roboticists, artificial-intelligence experts, scientists, and innovators from across the globe to revolutionize wildfire detection and suppression,” she said.

XPRIZE Wildfire encourages teams from around the world to innovate across firefighting technologies in two different tracks designed to transform how fires are detected and suppressed.

    • In the Autonomous Wildfire Response track, teams will need to monitor at least 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), and autonomously suppress a wildfire within 10 minutes of detection.
    • In the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence track, teams will have one minute to accurately detect all fires across a landscape larger than entire states or countries, and 10 minutes to precisely characterize and report data (with the fewest false positives) to two ground stations.

The day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Palmer Luckey, a 30-year-old founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company that sold for $2 billion, announced that he was forming the first team to compete for the prize. He said he cares more about solving the problem than winning the money, but he believes the cash will motivate other contestants to form teams and compete.

“I sold my last company for billions of dollars so I can do whatever I want,” he said. “We started working on wildfire tech because I think it’s very, very important. The money in this prize to me is honestly immaterial.” Luckey said at the contest launch that he thinks software, not hardware, will make the difference in detecting and containing fires.

The four-year contest is not winner-take-all. Teams will compete for top prizes of as much as $3.5 million and a bonus $1 million prize to develop technology that can detect fires both from the ground and from space, and fight them using drones or other autonomous vehicles. They’ll compete, for example, to see which technology can accurately detect fires across a land mass the size of a state or country in one minute or suppress fires using an autonomous vehicle within 10 minutes.

Andrea Santy, who is running the competition for XPrize, also said the prize money may not be the most important driver. Teams will benefit from multiple rounds of live testing and validation that would be hard to organize independently. The group is spending an additional $11 million beyond the prize money to run the contest, she said; some of that money will fund a documentary about the competition.

XPRIZE Wildfire is offered in partnership with Co-Sponsors PG&E and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Presenting Sponsor Minderoo Foundation, Bonus Prize Sponsor Lockheed Martin, Supporting Sponsor Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Benefactors Nichola Eliovits and Michael Antonov. Sixteen teams are already registered. For more information, to get involved, or to register a team to compete, visit the xprize.org/wildfire website.

ABC News reports on technology in wildland firefighting

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 18 Comments on 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.

Washington National Guard fire firefighter
Members of the Washington National Guard assisting on the Summit Trail fire near Inchelium, WA. WNG photo.

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.

[…]

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.

MORE: Nevada records worst air quality on record as wildfire smoke spreads
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.

DHS studies emerging technology for wildfire response

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , 1 Comment on DHS studies emerging technology for wildfire response

The project team evaluated over 60 systems

DHS study wildfire technologyIn December of 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator requested the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology research new and emerging technology that could be applied to wildland fire incident response, given the loss of life that occurred in California during the fall of 2017 in Santa Rosa and Ventura.

The project team identified three overarching conclusions that represent consistent themes captured throughout the course of the table top exercises and expert engagements.

  1. Time Criticality of WUI Fire Incidents: WUI fire incidents require immediate protective and response actions to save lives. The conflagration created when a wildland fire enters populated areas is unpredictable and can rapidly devastate these areas, threatening lives. Interventions and solutions that improve decision making and response in the initial minutes of a WUI fire are vital.
  2. Available Technology Solutions Exist: There exist available technologies (both government and commercial), which—if implemented—could immediately help emergency responders reduce the number of lives lost during WUI fire incidents. In particular, these technologies could immediately support ignition detection, fire tracking, public information and warning, evacuation, and responder safety. Improving capabilities in other elements of the WUI response (i.e. preparedness and critical infrastructure) may require investing in adaptable or developable solutions that are not immediately available.
  3. Public Education and Preparedness Measures are Vital: Public education and preparedness are essential to reducing the number of lives lost to WUI fire incidents. There is no solution more effective than preventing an ignition in the first place and ensuring the at-risk communities are prepared at the grassroots level to face wildland fire dangers.

The principal conclusions of this project are distilled into a set of seven key findings. They describe lines of effort addressing priority capability gaps that, if implemented, could substantially improve immediate life-saving efforts during WUI fire incidents. The key findings listed below are considered equally important to this objective and are not listed in any priority order.

  1. Implement and scale the use of state-of-the-art remote sensing assets to provide state and local stakeholders real-time, accurate, low-cost ignition detection and tracking information— especially fire perimeter using a mix of in situ, aerial, and space-based systems.
  2. Improve the ability of available and adaptable public alert and warning technologies to deliver more targeted and effective message across the whole community, particularly to individuals with disabilities and others with Access and Functional Needs (AFN).
  3. Improve use of key public and private social media and internet resources and capabilities to appropriately share data and adapt existing applications to enable more efficient and effective evacuation—e.g., expand and accelerate public-private partnerships through Integrated Public Alert and Warnings System (IPAWS) to include WUI incident-related evacuations, warning, and alerting.
  4. Support broader use of existing fire modeling and forecasting tools for pre-incident planning; while also advancing efforts to create high-confidence, timely WUI fire-specific models that can be used to inform response tactics during extreme conditions.
  5. Increase infrastructure resilience, especially critical infrastructure lifelines and support functions for wildland fire response—e.g., improve the resilience, interoperability, and reliability of communications, power utilities, digital links, and data center infrastructure.
  6. Integrate private, open, and crowdsourced data, resources, and capabilities to improve public safety situational awareness of WUI fire ignition detection and tracking.
  7. Support wide-scale adoption of interoperable, low-cost blue-force tracking technologies that feed near real-time situational awareness across key stakeholders, missions, and operations.

The project team evaluated over 60 existing systems, products, or solutions. Here is an example of how 10 were ranked for how well they addressed requirements.

technology address wildfire management safety

technology address wildfire management safety
Top ten solutions based on how many requirements that solution addresses.

In addition, the team evaluated the solutions for feasibility, affordability, usability, impact, and technology alignment.

The entire 131-page report can be downloaded. 2.8 MB

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to LM. Typos or errors, report them HERE.

Six new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 4 Comments on Six new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters
Hearing about technology wildland fire
Hearing about technology for wildland fire, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee June 5, 2019.

This week the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing in Washington about new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters. The Committee invited companies to describe new systems that can help firefighters communicate and improve their situational awareness. Legislation signed by the President in March requires the federal land management agencies to adopt within 6 to 24 months systems that can track in real time both the advancing edge of a wildfire and all of the firefighting resources working on the incident. Firefighters have been killed when these important facts about a dangerous fire were not known, due to smoke, darkness, or terrain.

In the video below we see interviews with the representatives of six companies describing their systems that may improve the situational awareness of firefighters.

(The video can also be viewed at YouTube)

Only three of the 20 Senators that are members of the committee attended the hearing, Cory Gardner (CO), Maria Cantwell (WA), and Martin Heinrich (NM). Approximately 20 Senators sent one or more  members of their staff to observe.

In addition to the six companies that appear in the video, other organizations that had exhibits and made presentations in the hearing were the National Weather Service, Rave Mobile Safety, Vulcan Fire, and Simtable.

Senators to followup on bill passed to enhance safety of wildland firefighters

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , 3 Comments on Senators to followup on bill passed to enhance safety of wildland firefighters

“Firefighters lives are as important as soldiers.” Bill Gabbert, 2018.

FRNSW drone
Fire and Rescue New South Wales photo

Next week there will be a fire management technology “Expo” in Washington, D.C. to introduce Senators to emerging technology that can aid wildland firefighters.

Fourteen months after it was first introduced, the Wildfire Management Technology Advancement Act became law after it was included in an omnibus bill, the Natural Resources Management Act. The Senate passed it with a vote of 92 to 8, and the House followed suit, 363 to 62. On March 12, 2019 it was signed by the President.

Now that the legislation has become Public Law 116-9 the federal land management agencies are directed to adopt or build on a number of new technologies that can enhance the safety of firefighters and aid in the suppression of wildfires.

The Expo scheduled for June 5 will give approximately eight to twelve proponents or vendors of new technology time to explain what these new systems can do. Then the Senators and their staffs will be able to individually talk with the representatives and examine the exhibits and displays the companies brought that will be lining the walls of the Senate hearing room.

Several of the technologies expected to be featured are listed below.

Later in June the Committee will convene their annual hearing where representatives of the land management agencies will bring the Senators up to date on their plans for managing wildfires this year. And importantly, the Senators, then fresh from their brief seminar on new technologies, will be able to discuss how the agencies are progressing on implementing the technology directives that they are now required by law to implement, many of which have due dates.

The key points in Public Law 116-9 have requirements for the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture. The completion dates were established from March 12, 2019 when the legislation was signed.

      • Establish a research, development, and testing program, or expand an applicable existing program, to assess unmanned aircraft system technologies, including optionally piloted aircraft, across the full range of wildland fire management operations. (180 days, due by September 8, 2019)
      • Develop consistent protocols and plans for the use on wildland fires of unmanned aircraft system technologies, including for the development of real-time maps of the location of wildland fires. (within 180 days, March 12, 2020)
      • Develop and operate a tracking system to remotely locate the positions of fire resources, including, at a minimum, any fire resources assigned to Federal Type 1 wildland fire incident management teams. (within 2 years, March 12, 2021)  According to a press release by Senator Maria Cantwell, by the 2021 fire season, all firefighting crews – regardless of whether they are federal, state, or local – working on large wildfires will be equipped with GPS locators.

In October, 2013 we first wrote about what we called the Holy Grail of Wildland Firefighter Safety. It is a system that could track in real time the location of firefighters AND the fire, all displayed on one screen. This data should be available in real time to key supervisors and decision makers in the Operations and Planning Sections on fires. Knowing the positions of personnel relative to the fire would be a massive step in improved situational awareness and could reduce the number of firefighters killed on fires. Too often firefighters have been surprised, overrun, and sometimes killed by a rapidly spreading wildfire when they did not know where the fire was and/or their supervisors did not know the correct, actual location of the personnel.

Not everyone on a fire would need to monitor the location data all the time, but at least one person should be given the responsibility to be sure that a rapidly spreading wildfire does not overrun the location of firefighting resources. Darkness, smoke, and terrain can obscure the location of the fire from firefighters on the ground.