Rather than manned fire towers, strings of low-orbit microsatellites will scour every inch of the Earth’s surface for signs of fire.
Instead of aerial water bombers, swarms of heavy-lift drones will douse flames with chemical retardants.
And in place of human smokejumpers carrying pickaxes, robotic dogs will pack cannons capable of snuffing infernos with high-intensity infrasound waves.
It might sound like a scenario ripped from the pages of Isaac Asimov but this is the automated future dozens of international teams are proposing as part of a four-year, $11-million competition called the XPRIZE Wildfire. The goal is to end the kind of destructive wildfires that incinerated entire Los Angeles neighbourhoods earlier this year, killing at least 28 people.
As far-fetched as the projects may sound, the deadly Los Angeles fires have demonstrated an urgent need for technological revolution in wildfire management, say industry veterans. The Santa Ana winds were too dangerous for manned aircrafts and the flames spread too fast for fire engines to keep up.
“The reality is that in firefighting, a lot of the tools we’re using today are not substantially different from what our grandparents would have used to fight these same fires,” said John Dabiri, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who sits on the XPRIZE Wildfire advisory board and co-led a 2023 report on modernizing wildland firefighting for a group of scientists and engineers advising former U.S. President Joe Biden.
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Founded in 1994, the XPRIZE Foundation has doled out millions of dollars to spur space exploration, ultra-efficient transportation, and seafloor mapping. The 47 teams that have qualified for the wildfire competition so far – including two from Canada – point to a future where humans step back and let artificial intelligence take over.
“Being able to use a robotic system that can get closer to fire so that we’re not putting humans in harm’s way, that’s something that is not science fiction,” said Prof. Dabiri. “But they need more investment to make them a reality.”
The case for a tech-oriented overhaul is clear. Globally, forest fires are destroying at least twice as much tree cover as they did just 20 years ago, according to a University of Maryland study. The United Nations is predicting the trend to accelerate through the century, with forest-fire rates increasing 50 per cent by 2100. In the U.S. alone, wildfires already cost up to $893-billion a year, according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Wildfire-fighting methods, meanwhile, haven’t changed significantly since water-bombers became mainstream in the 1950s, partly owing to sporadic government funding for research and development.
“We affectionately call it ‘rainesia,’ where the politicians forget all the lessons of past fires as soon as the rains start,” said Dan Reese, who spent more than 20 years with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, retiring as deputy chief of tactical air operations in 2016. “So we just keep repeating the same behavior hoping for a different outcome.”
The XPRIZE contenders are looking to change that.
One team, FireSwarm Solutions, emerged after co-founders Alex Deslauriers and Melanie Bitner lost a family home in Gun Lake, B.C., to wildfire in 2023. Air and ground crews support pulled back from the community owing to safety concerns and a record-breaking fire season that had stretched crews to their limits.
“That’s why we decided to put all of our energy and our life savings into this company,” said Mr. Deslauriers.
FireSwarm plans to use semi-autonomous jet-powered drones capable of lifting up to 400 kilograms of water for extinguishing fires. An algorithm controls the drone’s flight to and from the fire, only transferring to human control for the water drop.
By itself, 400 kg isn’t much water for anything bigger than a spot fire, but Mr. Deslauriers envisions a “matrix of drones” pre-positioned to respond to fires in high-risk areas. Plus, drones can fly continually at night and in low-visibility conditions without endangering human safety.
“I think in 10 years, our children’s children will be telling tales of helicopter pilots flying at night over fire and they’ll be shaking their heads wondering, ‘how is that even possible?’” he said. “It is extremely dangerous work.”
The other Canadian entrant, Vancouver-based SpectraCan, proposes using existing satellites, AI and cutting-edge hyperspectral imagery to provide instant fire detection from space.
While not technically a Canadian entry, California-based team Rain‘s co-founders, Ephraim Nowak and Max Brodie, are from the Kelowna area. The company has integrated autonomous flight and fire detection technology into helicopters.
If there’s a single moon-shot project, it’s the proposal from California-based MetaPhotonix: extinguishing wildfires through acoustic shockwaves created by curved beams of intense light.
Even if lasers and robot-dogs one day form the backbone of fire services across the continent, the present-day human element can’t be overlooked.
In Canada, seasonal firefighters make low wages and tend to move on to other jobs after a couple of years, said veteran Alberta firefighter Harold Larson, who has written two books about his 20 years on wildfire crews.
For Canada’s fire response to go high-tech, he said, it first needs to professionalize its ranks. “You can get all the technology you want,” he said, “but if you don’t have anyone to run that technology, what’s it worth?”