Everybody Goes Home: How technology is helping prevent wildfires from spreading

Wildfires devastate communities, ecosystems, and lives, and they are becoming harder to stop. But what if firefighters could spot a blaze in its earliest moments, before anyone even calls 911? In this episode of Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith travels to California to meet Deputy Fire Chief Zachary Wells and Dr. Neal Driscoll, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and one of the leaders behind ALERTCalifornia, an ambitious early warning and situational awareness system designed to detect wildfires as quickly as possible. Brad speaks with Wells and Driscoll about how their partnership, along with contributions from Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab and other collaborators, has helped build a system that improves situational awareness for emergency responders and expands access to life saving information for the public. They also discuss the future of wildfire technology, from predicting how fires might spread to making advanced tools more affordable and accessible to communities around the world.