KEEPING WATCH

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[Chris] I have one more question here. Part of something that we’re really interested in the project that we’re doing is the transition away from fire lookouts towards using new technology to locate fires. Kind of the way in which the lookout is becoming or seems to become is becoming more obsolete. It’s becoming—is being used for different purposes, like Air BNB lodgings.

00;00;53;05 - 00;01;06;10

[Chris] And so we’re curious to know what do you think is lost, perhaps, in the transition away from the human fire lookout

[Ray] I’m really glad you asked that question.

00;01;06;12 - 00;02;04;00

[Ray] Air Patrol goes back to the 1930s when they had sport planes, you know, biplanes and in the 1950s, air patrol really caught on. They would put up a plane, say, out of Coeur d’Alene. It would go up about 9:00 in the morning, 10:00. It would fly the entire area to Canadian border from Coeur d’Alene, the Coeur d’Alene forest, the Kaniksu forest, everything to Canada and how for how long are you going to see any acre of that you’re looking at when you’re flying over it a second jet?

00;02;04;00 - 00;02;49;11

[Ray] And lightning has a tendency, especially in northern Idaho, to put out sleeper fires where you get a good rain, a good soaking rain after the lightning, and it’ll put smoke down right away. A lookout’s going to see that when it comes up first and it will come up maybe at 3:00 in the afternoon every day, come up just a few puffs of smoke and die down again. It’ll do that for ten, 15 days. The Sundance Fire did that.

00;02;49;13 - 00;03;16;00

[Ray] An air patrol plane or just two sets of eyes in it are not going to see any given area long enough to catch a sleeper fire. And it’s a sleeper fires that when they do take off two weeks later, when it dries up and gets blown dry again and the wind hits it and they’re going to go, okay, so you better have some way to see it quick.

00;03;16;03 - 00;03;45;00

[Ray] Well, there’s where the lookouts are important. And back when we had plenty of lookouts, you didn’t necessarily even have to be able to identify the exact location of it, because I could shoot an azimuth out there like that. And this lookout over here can shoot another azimuth. And the way they cross those two azimuth readings are going to be where that fire is.

00;03;45;02 - 00;04;20;22

[Ray] And that pinpoints it, especially if you got a nice angle. You know, if you’re like, this is not so hot, but this way. And back when in the day, when there were lookouts that could do that on any smoke, it pinpointed right to the notch. And that’s been lost when they started reducing lookouts. Well, the cost of air patrol is significant compared to the cost of manning a lookout.

00;04;20;24 - 00;05;03;18

[Ray] So they only put up an air patrol at most once a day. And except Coeur D’Alene, they’ve been known to put up two a day after lightning. But forests like the Colville, there were two weeks without putting up an air patrol and who’s going to see it? Well, today, with people wandering around the woods with their cell phones and GPS, it’s great if you can have cell coverage, you know, GPS reading if you’re sitting on the fire.

00;05;03;20 - 00;05;25;02

[Ray] But if you’re sitting two miles away from it and you’re you don’t know which direction it is, for sure, you think it might be north or east and you get on your phone and you call in a fire. And I got GPS reading so and so, and I’m sitting here, I’m looking, I think I’m looking north, but I might be looking east.

00;05;25;04 - 00;06;14;15

[Ray] There’s fire out there. Well, how far is it? Well, it looks like … see they’re not accurate and there’s another thing that’s a factor that needs to be looked at that hasn’t been: the urban interface, moving of people out into the country. You’ve seen houses everywhere in the woods now. Those people, most of them, work in town to pay for that nice home out in the woods. They’re not even there in the daytime. So, who’s going to see the fire that’s on their property?

00;06;14;17 - 00;07;21;19

[Ray] Uh, satellites absolutely has never been fire detected from a satellite. Commercial aircraft? Yes. They can pinpoint one. The latest thing is replacing manned lookouts with cameras down in Oregon and southern Oregon. They replaced almost all of their lookouts with cameras, and they’ve proven to be somewhat effective. But you have to have a person in that dispatch desk, uh, in the in the dispatch room watching a screen, because that camera makes you rotate about once a minute, makes a certain or makes a circle about once a minute, and you got to catch you an inch and it’s got to be big enough smoke to see in the first place where the camera. Cameras are questionable.

00;07;21;21 - 00;07;55;10

[Ray] They haven’t really been perfected yet. The best of all worlds. The guy out there with the cell phone with G.P.S., uh, the air patrol, and lookout at all combined. There, you’ve got the best. Can’t we afford the best today? That’s always been my argument. Don’t hold much water, but that would be the best of all worlds.