How one mountain town hopes AI can help fight wildfires

A popular Colorado ski resort is adopting a new AI-powered smart city solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it better detect wildfires, as well as modernize a host of other city services.

Vail is expanding its firefighting lineup with hotter and drier weather Climate change increases the risk of wildfires In the western United States. Colorado has suffered 11 of 20 The largest fires In the history of the state only during the past five years. Researchers and first responders are increasingly exploring ways in which new artificial intelligence tools may help them get ahead of fires.

“Fires are part of our lives (now) in the mountains, and we have to be prepared for them,” says Russell Forrest, Vail City Manager. Edge.

Collaborating with HPE to quickly detect wildfires this year, Forrest was monitoring a forest fires It burned about 30 miles from his hometown in July. “One of the things that became very clear with this fire is that quickly detecting a fire and then responding to that made a huge difference and will continue to make a difference in terms of managing future fires where we are,” he says.

Forrest reached out to HPE and Kamiwaza, which has developed an AI orchestration platform, to ask how AI could help the city. Now, Vail has become the first municipality in the United States to adopt this idea HPE’s new “Smart City Solution” was developed in collaboration with Kamiwaza, Nvidia, and several other technology companies.

The goal is to make it quicker and easier to analyze the footage the city already captures, using cameras placed on buses and vantage points high on mountains. Until now, it was primarily people analyzing these videos, trying to spot signs of fire, sometimes stymied by whether what they saw was smoke or fog. They may have to send people to a place where there appears to have been a lightning strike to see if it started a fire.

The new AI-powered system can restore higher resolution images if necessary and then apply video analytics to them, explains Robin Brown, HPE’s vice president of AI and hybrid cloud business development. It has been trained to recognize lightning strikes and smoke in real time. On the interactive backend, Kamiwaza adds additional context such as weather indicators (has it snowed recently or is there Red flag warning In reality?) This may indicate how serious this event is and how to respond to it.

In addition, geospatial data analysis provided by Blackshark.ai has also been integrated into the smart city system. It can use drone and satellite images to assess how dry or healthy vegetation is as a measure of fire danger, as well as see how close fire-prone trees are to homes to know what to remove.

Vail isn’t alone in testing new AI tools for fire detection. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has sophisticated Experimental Next generation fire system (NGFS) to automate fire detection from satellite images. It looks for thermal anomalies to detect fires and then sends alerts over the Internet Dashboard Which debuted in February to keep first responders and other officials informed.

The puzzle with all the excitement around using AI to detect fires is that the boom in new, power-hungry AI data centers has also led to a wave of… New fossil fuel projects. Planet-warming pollution caused by new oil and gas infrastructure could add fuel to the fire by exacerbating climate change.

Forrest says energy demand is something he also took into consideration before implementing the new program. HPE’s smart city platform will run from a nearby data center powered primarily by renewable energy. The data center is connected to the local power grid with electricity provided by Holy Cross Energy, a rural electric cooperative that says 76 percent of its portfolio in 2024 was made from renewable energy (mostly wind). This is a higher percentage than the nation as a whole; Only about 20 percent of The electricity mix in the United States It comes from renewable energy sources.

Wildfire detection and prevention is just one part of HPE’s Smart City platform. Vail also plans to use it to streamline administrative tasks, including reviewing housing permits and business license applications, ensuring municipal websites comply with federal laws ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities, and more. The public library’s new “digital concierge” should help provide information to residents and visitors. The city, with a population of just 4,300, receives up to 30,000 visitors a day during peak ski season, and the hope is that the AI ​​platform can free up staff to tackle more pressing priorities.