At the end of the particularly hot and dry summer of 1910, a series of thunderstorms and man-made sparks ignited 1,736 small fires in the northwestern United States. Hurricane-force winds fanned the flames, coalescing the fires into a three-million-acre inferno that destroyed several towns and left nearly 90 dead. Those working to put out the fire saw walls of fire several hundred feet high, with one forester likening them to a “real red demon from hell.”
Known as the “Big Blowup” or “Big Burn,” the 1910 fire remains the largest wildfire in U.S. history, but climate change and population expansion into formerly wild areas increase the risk of devastating wildfires. Every year, wildfires in the United States kill directly about two dozen people on average, cause countless smoke-related illnesses and costs hundreds of billions of dollars. In the last decade alone, wildfires have destroyed more than 97,000 structures. The growing scale of the wildfire problem has made fighting them more difficult, with firefighting personnel and equipment shared among states or countries at peak. global fire seasons begin to overlap and increases in intensity.
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The best way to prevent this destruction is also one of the hardest: detecting fires before they get out of control. In the century since the Big Burn, wildfire detection has changed little, but fire experts now say technology is finally enabling real progress in this area.
“All of these technologies are coming together and putting us in a better position,” says Neal Driscoll, principal investigator of ALERTCalifornia, a public safety and wildfire monitoring program based at the University of California, San Diego.
Acceleration of response
The slow evolution of these technologies began with the Big Burn itself. The U.S. Forest Service, then still in its infancy, used an influx of post-disaster funds to build a vast network of seasonally staffed mountaintop fire towers, high platforms and trees in fire-prone areas.
These towers, from which lookouts can see for miles in ideal conditions, have been built throughout the country. Of the tens of millions of acres of dry forests in the American West and brush-filled forests in the East, fire-prone lands are almost everywhere in the continental United States.
Around 1930, there was more than 8,000 of these structures across the country, each with rudimentary technology – primarily the Osborne Fire Finders, which were monitoring devices called alidades used to precisely pinpoint the location of fires remotely and direct fire crews. The Osborne fire detector, which does not require electricity, is still used in some locations to complement modern GPS locators.
Even today, security guards live without running water and little electricity and spend their days scanning the horizon for anything out of place – a light mist or a fallen tree. “Your whole life is built around looking out those windows,” says Michael Guerin, president of the Forest Fire Lookout Association and a longtime volunteer operator. “Your head is always spinning and you are always paying attention to your surroundings… When you see your first cigarette, your heart starts racing.”
However, staffing and maintaining watchtowers can be expensive, and many have been demolished in recent decades. Only a few hundred of them are still staffed. Even where towers are still in place and are the best way to detect the first flickers of flames, sometimes there are not enough of them to monitor all parts of a fire-prone area.
But they are still used, in part because researchers have not been able to develop technology that can provide comprehensive wildfire monitoring on its own.
Spotting fires from space
Satellites have been used to detect fires since 1980, when the NOAA-6 weather satellite identified a series of bright spots in an image of the Persian Gulf that turned out to be methane burning above oil wells. This discovery led to the creation of dedicated environmental observation instruments in space that have helped fire researchers better understand global wildfire activity and the extent of recent and active fires.
But there are technological limits to the current fire detection capabilities of satellites. Geostationary satellites, which regularly monitor a region of Earth from a relatively high orbit, can provide more frequent updates but are too far away to image the small, early-stage fires that firefighters are most likely to stop quickly. Satellites in low Earth orbit can see these small fires, but can only pass a given area three to four times a day, which is far too slow to catch fast-moving flames.
Earth Fire Alliance, a technology infrastructure nonprofit, is trying to solve this problem with the relatively new idea of a multi-satellite constellation. The more than 50 planned satellites would be close enough to each other to be able to take frequent photos and generate data on even very fast fires, and close enough to Earth to photograph even very small fires. Its single-satellite prototype was launched in March last year, three of the fully functional satellites were launched earlier this month and the rest of the network is expected to be launched over the next four years. Data from these satellites will then be integrated into the monitoring systems of several national and state fire departments around the world, some of which are already using data from the prototype to prepare for this integration.
“One of the first fires we detected was a small roadside fire in Oregon,” says lead scientist Michael Falkowski, a former program manager in NASA’s Earth Sciences Division. “It was started by someone dragging trailer chains behind their vehicle on the highway, and it started two or three very small fires. They never got bigger than half an acre and we could see them from space.”
Eyes on the ground
In addition to trying to detect fires from above, camera systems and sensors have been set up in some places, including California, to monitor more places more continuously than humans in the towers can. Although these systems are likely to miss fires when smoke travels away from the sensors, they remain one of the primary sources of information for firefighters and communities exposed to wildfires.
ALERTCalifornia maintains a network of more than 1,200 cameras monitored by firefighters and researchers across the state. They can watch fires move and spread, allocate resources to the fires that need them most, and find the safest path for firefighters to reach the flames.
“A lot of times we’re past calling 911,” says Driscoll, the project’s principal investigator. “The success of this program is measured by fires that are never heard of because they were put out before a 911 call or because they never grew large enough to have a name. »
The program operates the third generation of wildfire monitoring systems at the University of California, San Diego. Between 2019 and 2023, it doubled the number of sensors monitoring the California countryside, and since 2023 it has focused its efforts on integrating AI into the system to monitor when humans cannot.
Kern County, Calif., Deputy Fire Chief Zachary Wells said that early this fire season he was able to use a combination of new data sources to plan a response to two nearby fires that broke out within minutes of each other. They could have been mistaken for the same fire if the only information available came from 911 calls.
“I was able to see and receive a notification through the AI that another fire had broken out, and I can say with 100% certainty that this is a new fire,” Wells recalls. “Our chief officers were able to divert equipment and ensure that we could send firefighters to this new start, so that both responses received the correct equipment.”
In some other Western states, including Oregon, Nevada and Arizona, similar camera systems exist. However, their installation and maintenance can be expensive, and some fire-prone areas are too dense or rainy to benefit from their monitoring. Yet the existence of these high-tech systems provides an unimaginable level of ease for first responders battling the Big Burn more than a century ago. And these systems could help reduce the chances that the 2026 fire season – already off to a flying start across the country – will produce another big blaze.
“Using technology to improve our ability to make decisions [about wildfire response] It’s really benefited us,” Wells says. “We’re seeing it just grow and evolve over time.”