
Ask HN: Why can't we prevent wildfires / bushfires? - Viralsneezer
Re the annually recurring wildfires near west coast of USA and Canada, and the bushfires near the east coast of Auatralia:
Why can&#x27;t this be implemented immediately: 
Satellites keep constant watch on fire-prone areas. Detect a wildfire &#x2F; bushfire almost as soon as the first sparks occur.
Automatically generate alerts ... and trigger launch of firefighting aircraft (choppers, drones) to douse a fire within a few minutes of detection. 
Use AI predict rate of expansion of fire (wind speed and direction data, realtime satellite thermographic analysis to give size, expected rate and direction of fire growth). 
The satellites that can do this have been in place for years. 
USA, Canada, and Australia have the resources to implement this before the next fire season.
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aurizon
Blame the Sierra Club and their ilk. Forests evolve to have trees and an
'understory', bushes and smaller plants, grasses etc. In a natural forest man
has not meddled with the natural fires that burn this understory periodically.
Aboriginal tribes lived in forests and got burned out and learned to assist
nature with frequent small burns. These kept the understory in check. Now
civilised man stamped out each fire and a huge inventory of unburned
understory accumulated. Then a few dry years and the understory dried out and
became a huge flammable mass. Fires could not be controlled. The hot air
spread and dried out all growth it its path - which was then like gasoline as
the volatiles were cooked off and fire was able to progress faster than a man
could run, and the wind created a blowtorch effect that dried out
roofs/structures and they also burnedn. The only solution is wide structural
gaps(fire breaks) around buildings and understory burning every 2-3 years - as
needed.

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selftest
Controlled burns need to come back with much more regularity and aggressive
practices. Hard to do when many of these areas are close to suburbs. Even as
late as the early 2000's I remember many controlled burns happening in
Southern California, but it obviously wasn't enough because vast areas would
still burn every few years. Now it's seemingly every year or even multiple
times a year. We're never going to catch up with prevention unless we actively
burn/cut vast swathes of land... Like probably hundreds of thousands of acres.
It's probably naive to think that will happen in a short enough timespan to
actually impact current conditions, though we can hope.

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deostroll
Satellites aren't always geo-stationary. There is no satellite solely launched
with this specific goal in mind. Many satellites pass over a forest area at
specified time of day. And in that time there should be enough illumination to
discern a forest fire. But even if you spotted one via a real time photo, it
would have already been widespread beyond control; it would have spread over a
wide area to be discerned by a satellite photograph.

