Enlisting Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires for the Long Haul
Late last year, a New York Times piece highlighted how the Pentagon has leveraged short-term pilot efforts to fight wildfires over the past 35 years, dramatically enhancing domestic civilian wildfire efforts for the digital age. With the rising threat of climate change and increased damage caused by wildfires nation-wide, it’s high-time the Pentagon began consolidating these piecemeal efforts into a permanent, institutionalized resource that meets the needs of our era.
Due to decades of forest mismanagement, and the exacerbating effects of climate change, wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, wreaking catastrophic damage to lives, livelihoods, property, and the environment. An average of 70,000 wildfires blaze through the U.S. each year, destroying approximately 5.8 million acres of land annually. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that wildfires burned over 10 million acres of land in the U.S. in 2020 alone, the worst fire season on record, and over 7 million acres of land in the U.S. in 2021.
In California alone, nearly 10,000 fires burned over 4.3 million acres in 2020, making 2020 the largest wildfire season recorded in the state’s modern history. Thirty-three lives were lost and almost 10,500 structures were damaged or destroyed. Estimates of fire suppression and property loss costs alone exceed $10 billion.
The extent of wildfire damage goes beyond those whose lives and property lie in the path of blistering flames, as toxic smoke from wildfires burning through built environments is correlated with an increase in hospitalizations for respiratory issues. As New Yorkers will attest, last July, smoking drift from wildfires in the west coast produced an eerie haze across the Big Apple, resulting in the worst rating for air quality in fifteen years by the Environmental Protection Agency.
A lot can and should be done to tackle the challenge of wildfires. This includes solutions ranging from prevention and mitigation measures like prescribed burning for better forest management and combating the climate crisis by reducing emissions and making transformative investments in green technology to removing kafkaesque legal hurdles preventing the employment of tried and tested inmate-firefighters once released from prison and more-timely post-fire disaster response.
Today, rapid improvements in technological fields such as computer vision, sensor and satellite proliferation, and the widespread availability of high-fidelity commercial media streams have created new opportunities to revolutionize how we tackle wildfire. These technological capabilities — such as ground, aerial, and satellite sensor platforms combined with automated insight from computer vision algorithms — can now be used to better map the movement of wildfires for greater real-time awareness. Comprehensive situational awareness enables on-the-ground fire command to evacuate areas and move resources to fight wildfires in a more timely and efficient manner, saving countless lives, homes, and property.
From the government’s end, the Pentagon has played a significant role by providing imagery to civilian firefighters through its various aerial and satellite sensor platforms. These include aerial drones capturing full motion video, as well as high orbit satellites offering global revisit rates of only 10 seconds.
From the private sector’s end, AI companies have leveraged Pentagon sensor platforms to train and field computer vision models to provide fire-fighters with the real-time awareness they desperately need. Through a contract with the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, we developed and deployed the CrowdAI Wildfire Mapping Model to run on full motion video taken from MQ9 drones flown over wildfire prone areas so that the California Air National Guard (CA ANG) and CAL FIRE could map fire extent in real-time, thereby understanding the size, perimeters, and intensity of a fire, while tracking whether spot fires were igniting in other locations.
Unfortunately, this was not intended for long-term sustained use, despite the proven success of these technologies in the field. While Pentagon involvement over the past 35 years has been indispensable to civilian wildfire efforts, it has often come in the form of short-term pilots, as opposed to sustained programs planned for the long-term.
In Pentagon parlance, pilots are for testing emerging solutions, while established programs are for sustained solutions to sustained problems. Some argue that Pentagon involvement in domestic disaster response efforts should only be called upon in a “break glass in case of emergency scenario.” The past few years have shown us that we are indeed in a “break glass in case of emergency scenario” and the wildfire emergency is now our baseline normal, as the wildfire season has become the wildfire year.
We should stop with the practice of annual extensions to pilots. These extensions are nothing more than incremental half measures, which leave firefighters and state governments hanging in limbo on a yearly basis as each subsequent fires occur.
Thankfully, in the case of California, Representative Adam Schiff led a charge to secure long-term Pentagon support via its 2019 FireGuard program for his state’s wildfire-fighting efforts. But states beyond California also face the scourge of wildfires, and the Pentagon should enable long-term imagery access to state firefighting departments across the country.
Leveraging the tools and capabilities that one part of our government already has to help tackle problems in areas not traditionally viewed as falling under its purview, but for which that part of government is well-situated to help tackle, maximizes taxpayer dollars, and in this case can save lives and livelihoods.
This piece is co-authored by CrowdAI CEO and CO-Founder, Devaki Raj, and CrowdAI Head of Policy & Government Affairs, Jafer Ahmad.
