AI-powered cameras are the newest thing in fire detection on Arizona’s Coconino National Forest. Some greet the technology with optimism. But others worry about the future of the HUMAN fire lookouts who have kept watch for decades.
The job of a fire lookout sometimes runs in family lines. That’s how it was for Jane Croxen, whose grandfather was the first lookout posted on Arizona’s national forests, so the family stories say. "It's sort of addictive," she says of the job. "It kind of gets into a person's blood and their soul."
Wind gusts through the open windows of her fire tower, perched thirty feet off the ground. Besides that and the crackle of the radio, the only sound is the ticking of the clock. "It’s a beautiful, unique job," Croxen says, "and not many of us have the privilege of working in an office building that has a 360-degree window."
It’s a vital job, too. Hundreds of fire lookouts in the U.S. keep watch on isolated mountains during the summer and fall. Lookouts like Croxen can tell a lot about a fire just from the color of the smoke or the way it's blown by the wind.
It’s a unique art. Some would say, a dying one. Since the heyday of fire lookouts in the 1950s, their number has plummeted. New technologies from aircraft to satellites played a role in that. Cameras equipped with artificial intelligence are the latest thing.
Out on the Coconino National Forest, Brian Kelley props his laptop on the hood of his truck to check out a possible wildfire. He's with Arizona Public Service, which recently installed 16 AI cameras in areas with powerlines they want to protect.
Once a minute a new panoramic image pops up. "If I open it," Kelley says, "there was a short puff of smoke. This is probably an illegal campfire."
The cameras can get tricked by diesel fumes or dust clouds. But Kelley says they learn and improve over time. "It’s really neat what they do. They’ve even detected fires at night through infrared," he says.
T8: Smoke sightings are confirmed by a person at the camera company, PanoAI, which operates in 11 western states. Then an alert with GPS coordinates goes to fire responders. Fire officer True Brown says Coconino County Dispatch Center is quiet now, but if a call comes in, "it gets very busy very quickly."
Brown says the new cameras are on duty 24/7 and 365 days a year. "It’s a pretty amazing system. We’re starting to integrate it more and more into how we’re responding to incidents—or at least how we’re detecting them, and then responding to incidents."
But Brown doesn’t think cameras will replace human lookouts, at least, not yet. "The ones that have really been around for a long time can tell you sometimes the exact road you need to drive down to get to an incident. It’s really that long-term historical knowledge of the forest that is invaluable," he says.
Longtime lookout Zeyn O’Leary worries agencies are too quick to adopt new tech. He spoke from his fire tower in Oregon.
"Frankly the fire lookouts in this area are running circles around the cameras," he says. O’Leary has looked at the numbers and says humans usually spot fires faster and at much farther distances.
Plus, a PanoAI camera costs 50 thousand dollars annually, in the ballpark of a lookout’s salary.
"There’s a point where you have to say, okay, fair enough, I was beat fair and square, it was a fair fight," O'Leary says. "But I don’t feel the fire lookouts are getting a fair fight."
O’Leary says he knows technology will eventually replace him; the cameras will get better and so will fire-spotting satellites. But he says that day isn’t here yet, and meanwhile many lookout towers stand empty when they could be staffed.
Everyone agrees fires need to be found fast. The question is how.
