If on a hot, dry day a fire were to break out within a given 300,000-acre tract in northwestern Montana, in a stretch of countryside between the crest of the Whitefish Range and the glacier-carved peaks that embrace the Great Continental Divide, Leif Haugen is most likely the first person to see it.
Haugen has worked for more than half of his 52 years as a fire lookout, scanning the larch and pine landscape from a one-room mountaintop cabin. Alone most of the time with only his thoughts, his dog Ollie, and voices on the radio for company, he is part of a national group of professional observers who, like lighthouse keepers, stand lonely guard between civilization and the callous whims of society. nature.
And increasingly, it also finds itself on another divide: between human jobs and automation. As land managers look for new tools to deal with the threat of catastrophic wildfires, which is increasing in the western United States as the planet warms and more homes are built near vulnerable places, the days of the vigilantes could be counted Randy Moore, head of the U.S. Forest Service, told lawmakers in March that the agency was moving away from humans in watchtowers. The future of fire detection, he said, is cameras.
A spokesman, Scott Owen, declined to say whether the Forest Service had specific plans to reduce its number of lookouts. However, their ranks have already dwindled considerably since before World War II, when thousands of rangers were stationed on hilltops in the fledgling agency’s war against fire. Today, the service has only 71 lookouts in Washington and Oregon; 59 in California; and 52 in Montana, northern Idaho and northwestern Wyoming, Owen said.
But as northwest Montana officials will tell you, there are reasons the vigilantes aren’t ready to go away. Haugen’s job is not simply to locate fires, although he says he can do so in a wider range of conditions than helicopters (which cannot fly safely during storms), with greater precision in some cases than airplanes (which cannot maneuver easily in narrow valleys) and sometimes more accurately than satellites (which can mistake rocks heated by the Sun for fire). He also relays messages between dispatchers and firefighters in canyons where mountains block radio and cellphone signals.
It tracks local weather changes and serves as a safety lookout for crews on the ground, alerting them to fires that could shift in their direction and planning escape routes.
Wildfires develop in difficult terrain, in rapidly changing conditions, and with a large number of random possibilities. In places like Glacier, officials must decide whether letting a fire burn could provide ecological benefits or is threatening enough to put firefighters at risk.
New technology helps in these decisions, said Andy Huntsberger, district fire management officer in Flathead. But “it doesn’t replace the human element,” he said. Since 1998, the number of staffed watch towers in Glacier and Flathead has increased from 5 to 12.
No one doubts that cameras are getting better at detecting smoke. Scientists are also getting better at monitoring wildfires from space, although satellites still have major limitations. The main fire observation orbiters used by NASA and the Forest Service can observe the same place in the United States only a few times a day, and not always from a good angle. So even after a fire is large enough to be detected, it can take up to 12 hours before a satellite detects it and processes the data, said Louis Giglio, a professor at the University of Maryland who works with NASA.
Weather satellites over the same region can locate hot spots more quickly, but they work better in open, brushy land than in forests, said Ryan Leach of the National Weather Service in Montana.
Canada, which has had a record wildfire season, is preparing to launch satellites dedicated to fire monitoring in 2029. Startups in Israel and Germany are building satellite-based early warning systems. However, detecting fires earlier might not be the biggest benefit, Giglio said. Instead, data from the new orbiters could improve models of how fires spread. This could help officials better plan evacuations and help land managers conduct more thinning in dense forests.
“It takes a certain type of person” to be a lookout, Haugen said. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ And they do it for a year and they can’t stand it.”
By: RAYMOND ZHONG
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6901815, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-21 22:40:07
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