Firehawk Monitors for Wildland Fires
Technology is impacting how we fight fires. Someone from South Africa has a great idea. It's called Firehawk - remote cameras that scan for wildfires (from KGO-TV San Francisco).
Sept. 30 - It's only been on the job for a month, but already a high tech fire detection camera seems to be working. It's the only one of its kind in the country and it's helping firefighters in northern California get an early jump on wildfires....
The California Department of Forestry is the first in the country to try a brand new system called Fire Hawk. It's a digital camera mounted high above the trees that keeps an eye out for columns of smoke. It automatically rotates 360-degrees, or firefighters can manually scan for miles with a joystick. So far, its detected one fire.
Here is the link to the Firehawk website so you can learn more about this system.
Will this mean the end of manned fire lookout towers? I doubt it. I see this system supplementing the manned towers that are still in use today.
Posted October 28, 2005 09:05 AM · Link
· Technology
