Victoria to tip in $3M to spy on bushfires
- 09 February, 2010 12:03
- Comments (2)
Victoria’s troubled bushfire alert system may be bolstered with a fleet of fire-detection cameras after a $3 million government trial announced today is completed.
Three-month trials across fire-prone areas in southern NSW and Victoria will start from next week to test the effectiveness of a system of unmanned cameras mounted on fire lookout towers.
It follows a separate private trial of four EyeFi SPARC early warning systems in the Yarra Valley during the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in February last year. The captured footage was used in the Bushfire Royal Commission. EYEfi SPARC cameras will be monitored during the trial by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment and Forestry New South Wales using the EYEfi spatial video software. T he locally developed EYEfi SPARC system is used for detecting, pinpointing and tracking bushfires using solar powered video cameras that relay images to a central Web-based platform.
Twelve German made FireWatch sensors will be deployed in Victoria's Otway Ranges and a further three will be trialled near the NSW town of Tumut using controlled fires.
The FireWatch sensors automatically detect the presence of smoke via a software algoithm developed by the German Aerospace Institute for the NASA Mars Pathfinder Mission.
The system operates 24 hours a day with night-vision capabilities and is able to detect smoke associated with a lightning strike. Its range is significantly higher than a video camera, three times more sensitive and does not require human participation in the smoke detection process.
The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre will compare the effectiveness of the systems and the possibility of integrating them into existing alert systems which includes telephone and SMS alerts, and updated information available on the Country Fire Authority (CFA) website
In early January human error saw the CFA Bushfire Information Line provide outdated information for 12 days, while the authority’s website crashed in December during a day of extreme fire warnings.
Red Cross enterprise architecture and planning manager, Ken Garnett, who is researching the systems for use by the organisation, said in a previous story there is no single solution to deliver bushfire warnings.
“The whole communications infrastructure is difficult… mobile phones are great until or if the towers burn down, hand-held radios have distance limitations, and satellite cannot work through thick smoke,” Jarnett said.
“Satellite can be wheeled in, but will fail in smoke and storms, which is an obvious problem near the fire.
“It creates a situation between a rock and a hard place.”
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Comments
the fool on the hill
ironically the one fire detection and observation method that doesn't fail, costs peanuts and is immune to many of the 'fog of war' pitfalls is the good old human being.
nowhere in the hearings of the current royal commission has any fault been found with the service delivery of the fire tower operators on black saturday. in fact autonomous action in issuing a red flag warning by one such lookout may well have saved lives. this wouldn't have occurred had she been replaced by a deaf and dumb set of parameters
recent research in africa has identified that chimpanzees exercise remarkably acute skills in wildfire behaviour prediction and even have specialist individuals within the social group who perform these tasks and assume leadership in times of intense threat.
it takes many, many years to hone the the 'knowledge' that allows a gun observer to call the situation in a heartbeat. it is imperative that these skills are not lost. as a consequence of remote bean counter identifying the 'savings' to be made by automation of this ancient craft.
after all i very much doubt we could remember how to conduct a tram nowadays !
David Goodrich
Dear Darren
FireWatch was not looked at by the Victorian Government in the past. It has been operating in Germany for the past 8 years where it covers 1.1 million ha of forest and has reduced the area of forest burnt by over 90%.
FireWatch is not a camera like other systems. It is a sophisticated sensor that automatically detects the presence of smoke via a software algoithm developed by the German Aerospace Institute for the NASA Mars Pathfinder Mission.
The system operates 24 hours a day with true night-vision capabilities and does not require the use of experimental lightining detection devices to help it find a bushfire because it is able to detect smoke that is associated with a lightning strike.
The range of the FireWatch sensor is significantly greater than a video camera and 3+ times more sensitive. More importantly the system is fully automatic and does not require any human participation in the smoke detection process.
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