With California still reeling after some of its worst wildfires on record ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, Santa Clara County authorities this week approved artificial-intelligence-equipped, smoke-sniffing sensors to bolster the region’s early detection capabilities just as fire season gets underway.
In approving the sensors, Santa Clara County follows Oakland, which invoked the city’s deadly 1991 firestorm in deploying 10 of the devices in a 2023 pilot project; Palo Alto, which has installed a dozen; Woodside, with 13; San Jose Water, which has deployed 15, mostly in the Santa Cruz Mountains; and Stanford University, which has installed 25 of them in grassland and wooded areas on its property west of the campus.
“We all know that climate change is driving more frequent and severe wildfires throughout California,” board of supervisors president Otto Lee said, adding that if the devices enable a quicker response to even a small number of fires, “then it is absolutely worth the investment.”
Four out of five of California’s most-destructive wildfires, and nine of the 10 largest, have occurred since 2017, according to Cal Fire. Bay Area fires feature prominently on the lists of devastating blazes in recent years, including the 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills; the 2020 SCU Lightning Complex fires in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin counties; the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties; the LNU Lightning Complex fires in Napa, Solano, Sonoma, Yolo, Lake, and Colusa counties; the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma counties; the 2020 Glass Fire in Napa and Sonoma counties; and the 2017 Nuns Fire in Sonoma County.
In a report on the sensor project, Santa Clara County staff highlighted the SCU and CZU fires, which each destroyed some 1,500 buildings.
Lee in 2023 proposed installing fire-detection sensors in the county, and county staff worked with other local authorities — including several that have already installed sensors — to evaluate the costs and feasibility of deploying them in “wildland-urban interface” areas of the county.
Areas in the east and south parts of the county will see the first installations, the county said in a news release. Final cost has yet to be determined, but a county report pegged the price of purchasing and deploying 30 of the sensors and paying for their operation for one to two years at $210,000 to $260,000.
Seth Schalet, CEO of the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council, which buys and resells the sensors and works with local officials to deploy them, believes the catastrophic Los Angeles fires early this year accelerated officials’ decision-making.
“Los Angeles hasn’t receded yet in what it’s done to people’s fear of wildfire,” Schalet said. “Everybody now has wildfire on their mind.”
Each sensor costs about $5,000 to $7,000, with pricing dependent on whether a wind meter is included, and also on the level of tariffs on Chinese-made components — a little less than $500 per sensor under current import taxes, Schalet said.
The devices, which can sniff out smoke from up to four miles, will be installed in parks, on open-space district land, and probably on some private properties, Schalet said. They’ll go up on fences and utility poles where practical, and elsewhere on special posts, Schalet said.
In other parts of the country, the sensors have alerted fire departments to previously undetected wildfires, and the devices have also withstood flames, although it is yet to be seen whether they would survive an intense firestorm, Schalet said.
The devices will provide another real-time method of fire detection beyond the network of ALERTCalifornia cameras, dozens of which are scattered around the Bay Area.
The sensors should be in place by year’s end, Schalet said, though he hopes to see installation completed before October.
Made in the U.S. by Maryland company N5, the solar-powered devices detect gases and particulates that smoke produces. Artificial intelligence “machine learning” software analyzes the detections to determine the likelihood that a wildfire is present.
When a possible fire is identified, a device transmits a warning to local fire authorities, using whatever cell service has the strongest signal. If the chemical signatures of fire are strong enough to cross a threshold, the message to authorities is an alert, denoting a higher priority for response. If cell service is unavailable, as can occur when fires damage infrastructure, a backup Starlink satellite link is used, Schalet said.
Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga, whose district 5 in the west of the county includes many forested residential areas with narrow, winding roads, said “every minute counts” in responding to wildfire ignitions.
“Identifying fires as soon as possible can mean the difference between getting out or being trapped in some of these communities,” Abe-Koga said.
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“Anybody, I think, in higher education that has wildlands around the campus was paying attention to that,” Hill said. He added that typically during windy, low-humidity “fire weather” in the Stanford area, wind blows toward the west, reducing the chances of a fire spreading from the hills down into the campus.
“This project was about identifying innovative technology in the wildfire-resilience space,” Hill said. “Stanford wants to be used as a living laboratory.”
Stanford’s sensors have shown their sensitivity by detecting smoke from road flares set out near a traffic accident, Hill said.
“Having these sensors that are monitoring 24/7, 365, it’s reassuring knowing that tool’s out there,” Hill said.
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