Los Angeles children suffered traumatic disruptions to their education and social lives from the wildfires
The Eaton fire that devastated Altadena in early January burned down Juan Carlos Perez’s family home and the school where his younger daughter attended sixth grade.
Losing both anchors at once, Perez said, has been traumatizing for the 12-year-old. As the family moved from hotel to Airbnb, his daughter has become increasingly withdrawn and too anxious to return to school, asking to finish the semester online. The only time she interacted with friends was during soccer practice, Perez said, but that routine was suspended last month when the family moved this month to a friend’s house in Connecticut.
After disaster struck, all three faiths are worshiping under the same roof, forming a microcosm of peaceful coexistence
Entering a sacred space like the First United Methodist church in Pasadena can stir emotions. Curious visitors often wander through the church doors, attracted by its gothic exterior, and instinctively start to whisper.
The space on Colorado Boulevard – a busy thoroughfare that doubles as part of the Rose Parade route every New Year’s Day – has always felt holy, said the Rev Amy Aitken, the pastor. Now she wants it to feel like a safe space for two other religious groups that are sharing the facilities for worship: the Islamic Center of Southern California and the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.
Driven by freak environmental conditions, including prolonged drought and strong winds, the LA fires quickly grew to the point they were nigh-on impossible to contain, pushing firefighters and fire-monitoring systems to their absolute limit.
As the city rebuilds, California’s fire-fighting division is looking to change that.
The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire, is partnering with a group of organizations building the Firesat network, a constellation of over 50 low-orbit satellites that aims to revolutionize the way we tackle mega-blazes.
In these fires, every second counts. Brian Collins, executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit organization behind Firesat, told Business Insider that current fire monitoring systems are often too slow to give firefighters a clear picture of these rapidly unfolding conflagrations.
“In extreme circumstances, like we see in California with wind-driven fires, you have very little time to make those critical decisions. The faster you can make them, the easier it is to contain that fire,” Collins said.
He said Firesat would significantly improve the ability to track wildfires compared to the current system, which is mostly made up of weather satellites, some of which are run by the US and European Union.
Muon Space’s Firesat prototype satellite was launched earlier in March.
Muon Space
Collins said these satellites are designed to track large, intense fires and scan the globe relatively infrequently.
By contrast, the infrared sensors on Firesat’s satellites will be able to track smaller low-intensity fires the size of a classroom and — once the 50-satellite network is up and running — will be able to observe the entire globe in 15-20-minute intervals.
“In terms of fire detection, that is a dramatic, hundred-fold difference from current systems,” said Collins.
Fighting fires smarter
Space startup Muon Space is designing and building the satellites.
On March 14, it successfully launched a pathfinder prototype satellite aboard a SpaceX rocket. The prototype launch lays the ground for the planned launch of the first three Firesat satellites into orbit in June 2026.
Muon Space president Gregory Smirin told BI in an interview before the launch that this initial first phase will be able to scan every point in the globe twice a day, and be able to identify fires as small as five by five meters.
“We have sparse data, to be polite about it, as to how many fires there are all over the world and what the incident rate is. The goal is to be able to get to a point where we can get a much richer dataset about what the actual behavior is,” said Smirin.
“If you’re able to track hot spots and fires early, you can even identify where there are maybe fires that might be smoldering or low intensity ahead of high wind events,” he said, adding that this would allow firefighters to send resources to these smaller blazes before they become too large to contain.
Firesat also has backing from Google Research, and last week’s launch was praised by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Collins said Google’s AI and machine learning expertise would play a crucial role in sifting through the vast quantities of data the constellation is expected to generate.
He added that with the funding the Earth Fire Alliance has received from partners such as Google’s philanthropy arm and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the group was committed to providing the data from Firesat to public safety agencies for free.
Collins said the Alliance was already partnering with fire responders such as Cal Fire to understand how they might use the data.
A spokesperson for Cal Fire confirmed the agency’s interest in Firesat to Business Insider.
The satellites will be designed and built by the end-to-end space company Muon Space.
Muon Space
They added that the agency’s primary interest in the satellite network was in providing more persistent coverage of fires that are actively growing or being contained.
Smirin said he believed Cal Fire was interested in integrating Firesat into its emergency dispatch service, allowing the agency to validate which fires were growing quickly rather than wasting resources by dispatching crews to check on them.
“We’re definitely getting more extreme weather and more frequent fire, and we’re getting fire spreading in areas that it didn’t use to,” said Smirin.
“I think you’re just seeing more extreme weather in all sorts of ways, and it’s putting a lot more pressure on firefighters to figure out how to respond, he added.
The first FireSat satellite has launched and made a connection with Earth. The FireSat system is a collaborative effort between Google Research, Muon Space, Earth Fire Alliance, Moore Foundation, and numerous other agencies, and it has a single, deceptively simple purpose: to detect wildfires before they become too hard to contain and control.
Wildfires have been a constant problem for agencies. Early detection is vital, but fires can often start in subtle ways; by the time anyone notices the growing blaze, it’s too late to stop. Just take the wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year as an example. Apps have been created to crowdsource fire detection, and the traditional method of watching for wildfires is through satellite imagery.
However, smoke, debris, and other obstacles make satellite imagery unreliable at best. It is often only updated every 12 hours, too. FireSat builds on existing infrastructure to create what its team calls a “wildfire boundary map.” This system will enable people to view wildfires through services like Google Maps.
NASA / NASA
FireSat utilizes AI to search for fires. The way it works is by comparing a current image of a given location with previous imagery. “Differentiating between real fires and random ‘noise’ in the environment was a challenge,” Chris Van Arsdale, co-founder of FireSat, says. “We had to determine where to draw the line between what is a real fire versus things like sensor issues or misaligned pixels.”
The new model is particularly effective. Previous detection methods often only picked up on wildfires after they were a few acres in size, but FireSat is quite a bit more capable. Erica Brand, one of the project managers for FireSat, gave this example. “One of our team members lit a barbecue and a firepit in his backyard so we could fly the plane over and test it. And the sensors were able to pick it up.”
FireSat is still several years away from being fully functional, but the team believes it will be able to accomplish things no wildfire detection system has been able to before. According to Google, the full system will be able to detect a wildfire about the size of a classroom within 20 minutes. This will give response teams significantly more time to contain the blaze before it spreads to residential and commercial areas.
