Fire Detection Cameras

ALERT Wildfire is an expansion of the first network, ALERT Tahoe, which was a pilot program deploying PTZ cameras and microwave networks in the region surrounding beautiful Lake Tahoe. This initial project was funded through the Nevada Seismological Laboratory (NSL) at UNR, the Tahoe Prosperity Center, the Eldorado National Forest, and the USFS Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.

Soon thereafter, through a contract with the Nevada Bureau of Land Management, the network quickly grew eastward into northern Nevada where the BLM Wildland Fire Camera Project was born.

With growing successes in the summers of 2014-16, new contracts with the Oregon-Washington and Idaho Bureaus of Land Management, and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), provided further expansion of new fire cameras and microwave locations, and core university participation as UCSD and UO came aboard.

Sonoma Water, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, CALFIRE, NV Energy, and many counties, including Marin, Sonoma, Contra Costa, and San Luis Obispo have joined ALERT Wildfire to make a statewide network in California a reality.

Due to overwhelming interest in ALERT Wildfire technology, WildfireLIVE, a Nevada C-corp, was spun out of the Nevada Research and Innovation Corporation at UNR to not only help scale university-based operations within their original footprint, but to expand to other markets such as Utah and Australia.

• Government Agencies:
  • CAL FIRE: Provides significant funding to ALERTCalifornia, including a recent $10.4 million investment through the California state budget. CAL FIRE has invested over $20 million in the program in the last four years, with a commitment for future funding.
  • Office of the California Governor: Offers support to the ALERTCalifornia program.
  • National Science Foundation: Provided initial funding for the network.
• Utility Companies: Settlements from electric utility companies contribute to ALERTCalifornia’s funding.
• Private Businesses: Businesses such as Conifer Communications contribute financially.
• Federal and State Grants: ALERTCalifornia receives funding through various grant programs.
• Partnerships and Collaboration: ALERTCalifornia works with local, regional, state, and federal government agencies to strategically install new cameras, and these collaborations may involve cost-sharing or resource allocation.
• Other Sources: ALERTCalifornia also receives funding from unspecified “other sources”. 

During the 2016-2020 fire seasons, ALERT Wildfire provided critical information for over 1,500 fires, including:

• the LNU, SCU, CZU, August and North Complex Fires in 2020;
• the Kincade, Cave, Maria, Saddleridge, Woolsey, Lilac, Wall, Whittier, Thomas, Tule, Woodchuck, Earthstone, Draw, Snowstorm, Hot Pot, and Emerald fires;
• an arson spree in Lake Tahoe in 2016;
• and hundreds more.

In late 2017, the devastating North Bay Complex and Thomas fires brought into sharp focus the need to quickly expand coverage across the western US. Two years later, the ALERT North Bay network provided real-time monitoring of the Kincade Fire from inception and helped provide an environment where no lives were lost nor injuries in the first 24 hours of the fire during wide-spread evacuations–a first for a large escaped, wind-driven fire in California.

The loss of life and infrastructure, especially in 2017 and 2018, has only strengthened our resolve to implement a comprehensive network throughout the western US. Although the three partner universities had been building their own redundant microwave networks to reliably acquire imagery, it became obvious that deploying new infrastructure to cover large areas in a short period of time was not realistic.

A new strategy was adopted in early 2018 to install cameras on existing third-party microwave networks, build larger virtual networks, produce regional coverage, and do it quickly. In this model, “towers of opportunity” (e.g., Wireless Internet Service Providers, state and county services, and other private point-to-point communications infrastructure) are outfitted with fire cameras and associated equipment to potentially allow 100+ fire cameras to be installed in a single season. The data from these confederated networks are seamlessly incorporated into NSL’s back-end acquisition systems and presented on our Amazon Web Services website in a straightforward manner.

To firefighters and first responders, it means “more cameras, more quickly”, which equals better decision-making capabilities. Now dozens and dozens of cameras can be installed in a single month. 300 new cameras were installed in the year following the Camp Fire (2018) in California alone, with another 300 new cameras in the Western US during the historic 2020 fire season.

The state-focused program now manages a network of more than 1,144 monitoring cameras and sensor arrays (as of January 2025), and collects data that provides actionable, real-time information to inform public safety. In addition to the camera network, and in response to increasingly frequent and severe climate-driven disasters, ALERTCalifornia is prioritizing novel data collection and research. These data are open-source and are shared with fellow institutions and partners. 

In 2023, CAL FIRE, ALERTCalifornia, and industry partner DigitalPath developed a new AI system that provides early wildfire confirmation and actionable real-time data to quickly scale fire resources, helps evacuations through enhanced situational awareness, and monitors fire behavior. The AI platform is a new tool in the toolbox and allows data to drive firefighting decisions, which saves lives, protects habitats, and infrastructure. In its first season, the AI platform was utilized in all 21 CAL FIRE Dispatch Centers and detected over 1,200 fires across California, beating 911 call reporting over 30% of the time. It is especially effective in spotting anomalies in remote locations and is proven effective at night.