From satellites to AI, tech has a role to play in battling blazes

Listen to Marketplace each weekday at 3:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on LAist 89.3. This story originally aired on “Marketplace” on Jan. 13, 2025.

Cameras that analyze smoke patterns to gauge a fire's severity. Satellites that can detect a wildfire anywhere in the world, within minutes of a flare-up. There's an ever-growing repertoire of tools available (or to soon to be available) to fire officials, but can they keep with up the ever-growing intensity of the blazes?

"We're a good 20 years behind the curve," said Kate Dargan Marquis, senior wildfire adviser to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and a former state fire marshal for California. "We should be moving as rapidly as we can. And I don't want to say that technology is the answer because at the end of the day, there is a very difficult and complex problem to solve relative to keeping communities from burning down the way we just witnessed."

"Marketplace" host Kai Ryssdal spoke to Dargan Marquis about the role tech plays in fire response, as well as the economics behind its development. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: We were chatting just before we turned on the microphones, and you said you do a lot of work now on the future of fire. And before we get there, I want to talk about the "right now" of fire and what technology is out there that can help us figure out what's happening on fire, sort of even before they start.

Kate Dargan Marquis: Right, even before they start. So you were thinking, how can we predict the when and where of a fire?

Ryssdal: How can we predict it and see it? And, I mean, there must be AI-powered cameras and all of that.

Dargan Marquis: Well, let's start off then with the moment that the fires do start. We have put to work these intelligent cameras that are mounted on mountaintops, [radio] repeater sites, and we see the smoke columns rising from those cameras. We do an image assessment, a remote-sensing assessment. The computer system algorithms can define how bad the fire is by the image detections of the changes and the fire agencies are alerted at the moment the smoke is detected in the first place. We're also working really hard right now to put up a system called FireSat, and that is a low-Earth-orbit satellite system that will ultimately launch 52 satellites that circle the globe. Every 15 minutes, it will give us fire detections down to just a few meters in size. And this is something that firefighters don't have today.

Ryssdal: This is sort of a little sideways, but roll with me here. This is kind of an infrastructure question, right? It's a firefighting infrastructure challenge, the future of fire. And when you start talking infrastructure, you have to talk scale. And a lot of that investment seems to me to have to come from government sources. These private companies, I imagine, are counting on the government to sort of give them a little boost as they try to scale.

Dargan Marquis: Yes, but that is a tough sell. How you build a market and how you invest in R&D is always a chicken-or-the-egg question. You have to have a market to make the investment pay off. Government is not necessarily the most innovative of purchasers, so figuring out how to mix the innovative individuals in government, how to do what we call "co-development," where you sit down with a group of firefighters who may not know what technology could offer and paint the vision for them. And at the moment we're leveraging philanthropy to be able to show the way. That's why a number of large philanthropic folks, especially in the California area, have been investing in technology-related projects underwritten by philanthropic investments for the first several years.

Ryssdal: That's the scale challenge. It seems to me, there is also a speed challenge. And with the acknowledgement that you're a firefighter, not a climate scientist, it's clear that climate change means these fires are going to be coming more often, and they're going to be bigger. The speed challenge here is a very real one.

Dargan Marquis: Well, when by "speed" you mean, how long can we afford to get our hands around this before it's truly devastating?

Ryssdal: Right, how fast can we leverage technology and all the things you and others are working on in an atmosphere where, where the rate of change is speeding up?

Dargan Marquis: Well, we're a good 20 years behind the curve. So the answer is, we should be moving rapidly, as rapidly as we can. And I don't want to say that technology is the answer because at the end of the day, there is a very difficult and complex problem to solve relative to keeping communities from burning down the way we just witnessed. And a lot of that has to do with getting communities and individuals to engage at the level of the house. You know, we have to engage communities and citizens and the local politicians and the homeowners themselves to take the actions necessary. Some of that involves technology, but in high-wind conditions, in overwhelming fire starts, multiple fires in a small geography, under those kinds of weather and fuel and temperature, dryness, conditions, really, at the end of the day we have to have passive protections built in at the house scale. And that's an important piece of the equation.