During my seven years as a lookout, people often asked me why I hadn’t been replaced by cameras or satellites. But staffed towers are the still best method we have for preventing catastrophic wildfires
At first glance, the smoke was barely discernible: a faint grey smudge that would’ve gone undetected by the untrained eye. I’d been watching the same horizon in northwestern Alberta for over a year and I’d memorized every ridge, every cut line, every square parcel of farmland.
But in today’s Age of the Pyrocene, the stakes have never been higher. Climate change is fuelling hotter, larger, more destructive wildfires. I believe we need trained lookouts providing continuous observational coverage more than ever. Lookouts remain the fastest, most cost-effective method of early detection to prevent catastrophic wildfires from damaging our communities.late April to mid-September, I climbed a 100-foot steel fire tower and watched for smoke.
Today’s lookout towers in Alberta boast technological advances compared with towers in decades past. They’ve gone digital with 5G internet, telephones and cameras fixed atop the towers. After an undetected wildfire went on to destroy the town of Chisholm, Alta., in May, 2001, Chisholm’s tower was outfitted with a remote camera to monitor the area where the fire had ignited – an area that can’t be seen from the lookout.
Lookouts remain a fiscally efficient method of wildfire detection, Mr. Flannigan says, especially if you compare it with the costs of managing large-scale wildfires. When I started with Alberta Wildfire in 2016, there were 128 staffed fire towers in Alberta. In 2019, the UCP governmentby 9 per cent, which included eliminating staff at 30 fire towers. The province was “modernizing” wildfire detection, Devin Dreeshen, then the minister of agriculture and forestry, told the public.
Wildfire agencies in Northern Canada rely heavily on imaging from heat sensors on board NASA satellites, including MODIS and VIIRS, to assess and monitor wildfires in remote areas. But the current U.S. satellite sensors aren’t necessarily an effective means of providingdetection, Mr. Flannigan explains, but rather “situational awareness.
“The places we care the most about are the places where lookouts are stationed,” Mr. Fancie says. “A fire near, say, Dawson City needs to be dealt with quickly – and the lookout is proud of his ability to catch smokes fast so crews can get on them before they get large.” “Fire is a big business today,” says Fritz Lübbe, chief executive officer of Everseek, a Chile-based company that manages Firehawk Detection in North and South America. Firehawk“detect, validate, and report wildfires within minutes of ignition,” using fixed cameras mounted on towers and AI technology. Since developing its detection algorithm in 2018, the company has exploded. It works mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with 450 monitoring systems in Australia, South America and Africa.
Lookout Wildfire Fire Alberta Smoke Detection Towers Area Pulaski Southern Hemisphere Quebec
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