Inside the race to spot wildfires before they spiral out of control

In the late summer of 1910, an exceptionally hot and dry spell in the northwestern U.S. was marked by lightning storms and human activities that ignited 1,736 small fires. Strong winds turned these into a massive three-million-acre blaze that wiped out several towns and took nearly 90 lives. Those combating the fire faced towering walls of flames, described by one forester as a “veritable red demon from hell.”

This event, known as the “Big Blowup” or the “Big Burn,” remains the largest forest fire in U.S. history. Yet, with climate change and human encroachment into wild areas, the risk of severe fires is rising. On average, U.S. wildfires claim about two dozen lives annually, lead to numerous smoke-related health issues, and incur hundreds of billions of dollars in costs. In the last decade, wildfires have destroyed over 97,000 structures. The growing magnitude of wildfires has made them harder to combat, with firefighting resources stretched thin as global fire seasons start to overlap and intensify.

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Preventing such devastation is challenging, yet crucial: identifying fires before they become uncontrollable is key. For nearly a century following the Big Burn, wildfire detection saw little change. However, experts now believe technological advancements are significantly improving the field.

“All of these technologies are coming together, and they’re positioning us in a better place,” says Neal Driscoll, principal investigator of ALERTCalifornia, a public safety and wildfire monitoring program based at the University of California, San Diego.

Ramping up Response

The evolution of fire detection technologies began with the Big Burn. Post-disaster, the U.S. Forest Service, then in its early days, used new funds to establish a network of seasonally staffed fire towers on mountains and high platforms in fire-prone areas.

These towers, which offer lookouts views extending miles in ideal conditions, were constructed nationwide. Across the vast dry forests of the American West and the brush-filled woods of the East, nearly all land is susceptible to fires.

By 1930, there were over 8,000 such structures across the nation, each equipped with basic technologies, mainly Osborne Fire Finders, which are surveying devices known as alidades used to accurately locate fires and guide firefighting efforts. Though electricity-free, the Osborne Fire Finder remains in use in some areas to complement modern GPS-linked locators.

Even today, lookout operators live without running water and limited electricity, dedicating their days to scanning the horizon for smoke or disturbances. “Your whole life is built around looking out of those windows,” says Michael Guerin, chairman of the Forest Fire Lookout Association and longtime volunteer lookout operator. “Your head’s always on a swivel, and you are always paying attention to your surroundings…. When you see your first smoke, your heart starts to race.”

However, maintaining and staffing these lookout towers is costly, leading to the demolition of many in recent years. Only a few hundred remain staffed. Although these towers are effective for spotting emerging fires, they are often too few to cover all fire-prone areas.

Nevertheless, they are still in use, partly because researchers have yet to develop technology capable of providing comprehensive wildfire monitoring independently.

Spotting Fires from Space

Since 1980, satellites have been employed to detect fires, beginning with the NOAA-6 weather satellite, which identified bright spots in the Persian Gulf, later found to be methane flares above oil wells. This discovery led to the development of space-based environmental observation tools that have enhanced understanding of global wildfire activity and the scope of current and past fires.

However, existing satellites face limitations in fire detection. Geostationary satellites, which monitor a fixed region from high orbit, offer frequent updates but cannot capture early-stage fires that are easier to control. Low-Earth orbit satellites can detect these smaller fires but only pass over a given area a few times daily, missing rapidly spreading flames.

Earth Fire Alliance, a nonprofit focused on technological infrastructure, is addressing this issue with the innovative concept of a multisatellite constellation. It plans to deploy over 50 satellites close enough to provide frequent imagery and data on both large, fast-moving fires and small, early-stage fires. The prototype satellite launched last March, and three fully operational satellites launched this month, with the remaining satellites expected to deploy over the next four years. The data from these satellites will be integrated with the monitoring systems of several national and state fire services worldwide, some of which are already using the prototype’s data in preparation for full integration.

“One of the first fires we detected was a small roadside fire in Oregon,” says lead scientist Michael Falkowski, a former program manager in NASA’s Earth Science Division. “It was started by somebody that was dragging trailer chains behind their vehicle on the highway, and it sparked two or three really tiny fires. They never got to be more than a half-acre in size, and we were able to see them from space.”

Eyes on the Ground

In addition to satellite monitoring, some regions, particularly in California, have implemented camera systems and sensors to continuously monitor more areas than human lookout towers can cover. Though these systems can miss fires when smoke blows away from sensors, they remain crucial sources of information for firefighters and communities threatened by wildfires.

ALERTCalifornia oversees a network of over 1,200 cameras monitored by firefighters and researchers statewide. These cameras track fire movements, helping allocate resources to critical areas and determining safe routes for firefighters.

“Often we beat the 911 call,” Driscoll, the project’s principal investigator, says. “The success of this program is measured by the fires you never hear about because they were suppressed before a 911 call or they never grew large enough to have a name.”

The program operates the third generation of wildfire monitoring systems at the University of California, San Diego. Between 2019 and 2023, it doubled the number of sensors monitoring California’s landscape. Since 2023, efforts have focused on integrating AI into the system to monitor fires when humans are unavailable.

Kern County, Calif., deputy fire chief Zachary Wells says that earlier this fire season, he was able to use a combination of new data sources to plan a response for two nearby fires that started just minutes apart. They might have been mistaken for the same blaze if the only information available had been from 911 calls.

“I was able to see and get a notification through AI that another fire had started, and I could say with 100 percent confidence this is a new fire,” Wells recalls. “Our chief officers were able to divert equipment and ensure that we could get firefighters to this new start, so that both responses were getting adequate equipment.”

In some other Western states, including Oregon, Nevada and Arizona, similar camera systems exist. Installing and maintaining them can get expensive, however, and some fire-prone areas are too thickly vegetated or rainy to benefit from their surveillance. Still, that these high-tech systems exist at all provides a level of ease unimaginable to the emergency responders fighting the Big Burn more than a century ago. And these systems could help reduce the odds that the 2026 fire season—already off to a roaring start across the country—will produce another Big Burn.

“Using technology to enhance our ability to make decisions [about wildfire response] has really benefited us,” Wells says. “We only see that growing and evolving over time.”