US firefighters turn to AI to battle the blazes

Last summer, as Will Harling captained a fire engine trying to control a wildfire that had burst out of northern California's Klamath National Forest, overrun a firebreak, and raced towards his hometown, he got a frustrating email. It was a statistical analysis from Oregon State University forestry researcher Chris Dunn, predicting that the spot where firefighters had built the firebreak, on top of a ridge a few miles out of town, had only a 10% chance of stopping the blaze. "They had spent so many resources building that useless break," said Mr. Harling, who directs the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, and works as a wildland firefighter for the local Karuk Tribe. "The index showed it had no chance," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview. The Suppression Difficulty Index (SDI) is one of a number of analytical tools Mr. Dunn and other firefighting technology experts are building to bring the latest in machine learning, big data, and forecasting to the world of firefighting.