Last month, two fire detection cameras were installed outside Jackson Hole, monitoring near Snow King Mountain and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. They act as modern fire towers, using artificial intelligence to look for wildfire smoke.
“We're trying to catch fires that start right on the edge of the community, because history is showing us that those are the most devastating fires, the ones that start not way out in the wilderness, but the ones that are relatively close to the community,” said Raymond Lane, deputy chief of prevention and support services for Jackson Hole Fire and EMS. “We don't have a lot of time to catch those before they start doing a ton of damage.”
If a camera detects a wildfire, an alert is sent to a dispatch center, where a human verifies it before sending any alerts to responders.
Just recently, according to Lane, the cameras successfully caught a grass fire on private property. The camera alerted a minute before the 911 call came in, and the fire was quickly contained with no damage or injuries.
According to Lane, there haven’t been any false alerts so far, either.
“ The one alert we've received since we've installed these was an actual fire. So that's really encouraging. We're not too worried about a bunch of false alerts, which is a good thing,” he said.
Public awareness and transparency were major considerations before the department decided to install the cameras.
“One of the reasons we chose ALERTWest, which is the vendor that we chose to do these wildfire cameras [through], is because it is viewable by the public,” Lane said.
The cameras’ feeds are operational 24 hours a day and are accessible to the public online, updating every 15 seconds. Lane hopes the cameras will help with evacuations as well.
“I hate to use fear as a motivating factor, but when it comes to safety, if one more person evacuates because they click that link and they saw how scary that fire looks outside their neighborhood and they chose to evacuate when maybe they wouldn't have previously, that's a huge win, you know?” he said.
The cameras aren’t meant to be a replacement for firefighters.
“This is simply just another tool in the toolbox to help us just identify these things a little bit quicker than we would,” Lane said.
A third camera is set to be installed near Buffalo Valley later this year, according to Teton County’s website. To sign up for emergency evacuation alerts, go to your county’s emergency management page.
