A wildfire that rained down embers over Vernon in 2021 prompted the Okanagan city to re-think its approach to fire protection and seek new solutions—including the use of artificial intelligence for early detection.

The 83,000-hectare White Rock Lake fire was a wake-up call for Vernon, which was on evacuation alert for several weeks that summer and came to the brink of evacuating its entire population, about 46,000 at the time.

“In the 2021 White Rock Lake Fire, ember showers put the entire community at risk,” recalls David Lind, Fire Chief in Vernon for eight years.
On the day an evacuation order was recommended, “We had ash and embers falling all around the community.”

The evacuation order was narrowly avoided when the weather changed suddenly and the risk quickly diminished. But the debris throughout the city the next day was a warning that the entire community—not just forested areas—was now vulnerable to wildfires.
“Traditional approaches don’t serve us well to deal with embers that could fall and maybe spark 20 or 30 fires throughout the community at the same time,” Lind says. “There’s no way a fire department of our size could respond to all of those fires.”

A search for solutions led Lind to SenseNet, a Vancouver company that was looking for at-risk locations to beta test its AI-based wildfire detection system with federal funding support.

Read full article here (p.20-22).