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't this be implemented immediately: Satellites keep constant watch on fire-prone areas. Detect a wildfire / 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.

[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.

[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.

[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.