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Fire personnel respond to homes destroyed while a helicopter drops water as the Palisades Fire grows in Pacific Palisades, California on January 7, 2025.AFP via Getty ImagesArtificial intelligence, it turns out, is no match for Mother Nature.In the aftermath of Californias devastating 2022 fires, Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced a slew of new initiatives intended to mitigate future catastrophes. Were enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires, exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter, Newsom explained.The idea is simple: train an AI model to analyze a video feed to signs of emerging fires, and alert a human team that can extinguish the blaze before it becomes a disaster.But as the Palisades fire has shown, its not quite that easy, especially when weather conditions are as extreme as they were earlier in the week. The Palisades Fire was aided and abetted by Santa Ana winds which topped 100 mph spreading embers across brush, trees, and ultimately thousands of homes in the area.The problem is that under conditions like this, you may have as little as 60 seconds from when the fire ignites to essentially when its not controllable, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Forbes.Since the summer of 2023, Cal Fire, the states fire prevention and response agency, has relied on a vast statewide network of over 1,100 publicly available video cameras, known as ALERTCalifornia, to power its AI system, which was created and is maintained by the University of California, San Diego. Over the past year, there have been at least 1,200 instances across the state where the AI tool not only detected a fire, but was faster than traditional 911 reporting during 30% of those incidents. (Data for 2024 has not yet been released.)All fires start out as small fires, but when its pushed by 60-100 mile per hour winds, and the fuel switches from grass and brush to houses, filled with petroleum products, thats just untenable.Its hard, if not impossible, to understand whether this AI has been useful specifically in preventing the spread of otherwise destructive fires.Its really difficult to quantify the fires that didnt happen, David Acua, a Cal Fire spokesperson, told Forbes. But I can tell you that the data from ALERTCalifornia has been incredibly helpful, we have used it in fire behavior training."Experts say that while early detection is helpful generally, this weeks Palisades Fire in western Los Angeles fueled by unusually high winds and extremely dry conditions grew too big too fast before the AI-enabled cameras could make a meaningful difference.All fires start out as small fires, but when its pushed by 60-100 mile per hour winds, and the fuel switches from grass and brush to houses, filled with petroleum products, thats just untenable, Acua added.UC San Diegos ALERTCalifornia camera network captured this image of the Palisades Fire on January 7.ALERTCalifornia | UC San DiegoThe Palisades Fire is being called the most destructive fire in the history of Los Angeles County and Wall Street analysts predict it will likely result in damages of tens of billions of dollars. As of Friday morning, Cal Fire was reporting that this blaze had burned over 20,000 acres. More than 9,000 homes and other structures have been damaged or destroyed, and over 150,000 people are under evacuation orders throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area.Josh Wilkins, who worked as a firefighter for the San Bernardino County Fire Department for nearly 30 years, and now serves as an advisor to a venture-backed firetech startup, BurnBot, worked with early iterations of this system. He told Forbes that the fire detection AI is now much better than it used to be, but that its not enough.[The AI cameras are a] tool that we can use, but theres so much other stuff we have to do to wipe out wildfire, he said. Theres no way to wipe out the wind. Youre never going to change the Santa Ana [winds]. Were never going to change that. Theres nothing a fire truck or anybody can do.Cal Fire estimates that both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire in the Pasadena area, in another part of the region, are already in the top five of the states most destructive in recorded history. California alone spends over $3 billion a year fighting fires, while at the federal level, billions of dollars are spent annually on wildland firefighting nationwide.Multiple startups and even a fire-focused venture capital firm, Convective Capital, have sprung up in recent years, to support new fire prevention and mitigation technology. In November, a new trade group called the Association of FireTech Innovation was established by the leaders of Convective Capital, and a nonprofit called Megafire Action.The states AI wildfire detection system is not without its recent successes, however. The Orange County Fire Authority, a county fire agency to the south of Los Angeles County, just announced that in December, it had used this AI system to detect and suppress a December incident in a remote area known as Black Star Canyon, east of the city of Orange.Armed with this early detection, OCFA dispatchers launched a wildland fire response, and our firefighters contained the blaze to less than a quarter acre meeting OCFAs goal of keeping 95% of vegetation fires to 10 acres or less, the agency wrote on January 3. No homes or structures were damaged, no injuries occurred, and no evacuations were necessary.MORE FROM FORBES
