Fire emergency: better safe than sorry. The solution offered by CAE

As of July 7th, 2022, the fires have tripled compared to the historical average in Italy, with over sixteen thousand hectares of woods and land on fire since the beginning of 2022: these are the data emerged from Coldiretti's calculations.

On 29th June alone, 18 requests for air intervention were received by the Unified Aerial Operations Centre (COAU) of the Department of Civil Protection for extinguishing fires.

Many regions have declared a state of alert. In Emilia-Romagna it was already in force since 25th June, in the five central-eastern provinces of the region, and then the condition of "serious danger" due to the risk of wildfires has been extended to the entire regional territory starting from Saturday 2nd July and until 28th August. Wildfires are a scourge which, in such a drought summer, is being overwhelming on our Peninsula and which is also heavily affecting urban contexts such as the Capital. Italy was burning from North to South, not only Rome, but also Puglia, Sicily, Tuscany, Lombardy, Friuli... The situation was alarming. For this reason we want to investigate what technologies are available to identify areas at risk and detect the ignition of fire outbreaks in order to promptly intervene and reduce the damage as much as possible.

Fires are one of the most important causes of environmental alteration and deterioration of the territory; they have serious consequences for the natural balance and require long periods of time for the recovery of the forest and environmental ecosystem. Fires also increase the phenomena of slope instability causing the sliding and removal of the superficial soil layer, in the event of intense rains.

To better face and mitigate this calamity, CAE suggests the use of a wildfire monitoring and early warning system. This system aims at supporting the decision-making process used by the various bodies operating in the field of Civil Protection; particularly, it is functional to protecting the population and can guarantee a timely and effective intervention by the authorities responsible for extinguishing the fires.

This system is able to:

• identify the areas most at risk by calculating the risk indices of fire ignition;
• detect the ignition of fire outbreaksthrough continuous visual monitoring of the area    thanks to the use of high zoom and thermal cameras that can also be controlled remotely;
• support fire extinguishing operations in an emergency situation, by integrating forecasting models that allow to represent the possible spread of fire on the territory on geo-referenced maps.

The wildfire monitoring and remote early warning systems are composed of sighting stations with integrated sensors for measuring the meteorological parameters, as well as a combination of thermal and video cameras and software tools to be used in a control and supervision centre.

The operating room stations allow the operator to be aware of dangerous situations and detect the presence of a fire in the area. The system, which is based on Fi.De.Sys 2 web-based software, analyses the images of the sighting stations, detects fire events and alerts the users. Thanks to advanced image processing techniques, the system can detect false alarms induced by environmental disturbances and by possible sources originating from prefigured human settlements.

The wildfire monitoring and remote early warning system collects and provides information useful for deciding how to intervene with human and means resources to prevent fires from spreading.

Video of the wildfire monitoring and remote early warning system.

To know more, please find below the detailed description of these two systems: ARIF, Puglia Region