A red and white cupola perched atop a 100-foot steel fire tower.Trina Moyles
Trina Moyles is the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest.
At first glance, the smoke was barely discernible: a faint grey smudge that would’ve gone undetected by the untrained eye. I’d been watching the same horizon in northwestern Alberta for over a year and I’d memorized every ridge, every cut line, every square parcel of farmland.
From up in the cupola, a Plexiglas dome perched atop a 100-foot steel tower, I spun around the Osborne Fire Finder, a large compass used to measure the directional bearings on wildfire smoke, and peered through a mounted rifle scope to line up the shot: 34 degrees, 15 minutes.
I estimated the distance of the smoke from the lookout: 31 kilometres.
The smoke column rose up like a black python. Black smoke meant the fire was likely burning in coniferous forest – spruce or pine – a more flammable, volatile fuel type.
“I’ve got eyes on a fire!” I yelled down to a four-man initial attack firefighting crew, stationed at my fire tower. They sprinted toward an A-Star helicopter, which took off a minute later.
“XMA26, this is XMA567 with a presmoke,” I spoke into the mic of the two-way radio, passing the details to the wildfire manager on duty, including an estimated location.
“Confirmed wildfire,” the crew leader said over the radio.
A plume of smoke is spotted from the fire tower.Trina Moyles
PWF031 ignited in June, 2017, and I was the first to detect it. It was a small, uneventful fire: A lightning bolt had struck a massive pile of wood debris in a cut block. The fire was just 0.01 hectares in size, and the four-person firefighting crew was able to extinguish it by 10 a.m. the following day. The wildfire, like the vast majority that I’d call in over my seven-year career as a lookout, would never make the headlines, and that’s exactly the way the system is designed to work.
Early detection, quick assessment and – if necessary – rapid suppression to put the fire out.
Watching for wildfires from high up in a fire tower, as I did as an early wildfire detection specialist at a boreal lookout in northwestern Alberta, may sound to some like an antiquated way of monitoring our forests. “Haven’t you been replaced by cameras or satellites yet?” I was often asked. Indeed, most provinces stopped funding their programs over the latter half of the last century, and lookouts deteriorated beyond repair.
But in today’s Age of the Pyrocene, the stakes have never been higher. Climate change is fuelling hotter, larger, more destructive wildfires. I believe we need trained lookouts providing continuous observational coverage more than ever. Lookouts remain the fastest, most cost-effective method of early detection to prevent catastrophic wildfires from damaging our communities.
From 2016 to 2022, from late April to mid-September, I climbed a 100-foot steel fire tower and watched for smoke. I was paid $23 an hour, capped at seven hours and 25 minutes a day, despite often working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. There were certainly better ways to make a living, but I fell in love with the art of smoke spotting, an observational knowledge that deepened with each fire season. I strove to be “the first to see.”
On average, I reported six to seven wildfires every summer, threading myself into the legacy of lookouts who’ve kept vigil over Alberta’s forests and communities for more than a century. From 2014 to 2023, lookouts detected from 25 per cent to 30 per cent of wildfires in Alberta, according to Mike Kakoullis, wildfire detection program lead with Alberta Wildfire. Despite relying on different methods to detect wildfires – aerial patrols and reports from the public – he calls lookouts the “backbone of wildfire detection in Alberta.”
Lookouts have been around since Alberta became a province in 1905, says Tim Klein, a former lookout and wildfire detection co-ordinator with Alberta Wildfire who retired in 2019. After the wildfire ranger, the person responsible for managing wildfires, the next person hired – “before dispatchers, or even firefighters” – was the lookout, Mr. Klein says.
The earliest fire towers in Canada were primitive structures: a ladder up to a platform in the trees, or a shack on a mountaintop. In the early 1900s, provinces such as Ontario and Quebec erected networks of 300 to 400 fire towers, Mr. Klein says. British Columbia built around 320 towers. But with fewer resources, during that same time, Alberta maxed out at around 145 – a blessing in disguise, Mr. Klein says. Fewer towers on the landscape made it more feasible to fund staff wages and maintain infrastructure. Programs elsewhere became economically burdensome and fell into disarray, he says. No staffed fire towers remain in Ontario and Quebec today.
Today’s lookout towers in Alberta boast technological advances compared with towers in decades past. They’ve gone digital with 5G internet, telephones and cameras fixed atop the towers. After an undetected wildfire went on to destroy the town of Chisholm, Alta., in May, 2001, Chisholm’s tower was outfitted with a remote camera to monitor the area where the fire had ignited – an area that can’t be seen from the lookout. A report later found that the addition of the camera was an “asset” to the lookout, but did not “replace the human eye, which can detect better from close in to far off in the same scan.” In addition, lookouts today have access to predictive weather apps, including Windy and My Lightning Tracker Pro.
An Osborne Fire Finder, a large compass used to measure the directional bearings on wildfire smoke, located in the dome of the fire tower where Trina Moyles was stationed. The device uses a topographical map mounted on a turning disk, allowing lookouts to accurately locate a fire based on distant smoke.Trina Moyles
But the most essential technology remains analog: the Osborne Fire Finder, virtually indestructible in the face of extreme weather. The device uses a topographical map mounted on a turning disc, allowing lookouts to accurately locate a fire based on distant smoke. One summer, I witnessed my Fire Finder get struck by a finger of lightning that slipped in through a crack in the cupola window, and it remained unscathed. The same strike rendered a fixed camera mounted atop my lookout useless. As my lookout colleague, a “lifer” with 20 fire seasons under his belt, liked to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The name of the game is the same as it’s always been: “catch wildfires small and fast.” Lookouts are mandated to watch over a 40-kilometre radius of land – 1.2 million acres, or around 5,000 square kilometres – and report smokes within five minutes of discovery.
Minutes matter, says Mike Flannigan, a wildfire scientist whose experience spans 40 years. “When a wildfire is small, agencies can put it out,” he says. “Even when things are crazy hot, dry and windy. But that window of time can be really narrow, especially during extreme periods – I’m talking about 20 minutes.”
He points to the devastating wildfire that engulfed the village of Lytton, B.C., in late June, 2021, resulting in the deaths of two residents. Locals believed the fire was caused by sparks cast by a train on the railway, although investigators found the cause to be inconclusive. “Whatever the cause [of the fire], 20 minutes later, it was running through town,” Mr. Flannigan comments.
Putting out fires when they are small is the key to avoiding catastrophic wildfires such as the 2016 inferno that devastated Fort McMurray, Alta. – the costliest disaster in Canadian history, at $3.58-billion in insurable losses – and the 2023 B.C. wildfires that destroyed parts of West Kelowna and the Shuswap and caused losses of more than $720-million. “Every one of those [fires] could’ve been put out if you got resources to it while it was still small,” Mr. Flannigan explains. “That’s why detection and initial attack are so critical.”
Lookouts remain a fiscally efficient method of wildfire detection, Mr. Flannigan says, especially if you compare it with the costs of managing large-scale wildfires.
Trina Moyles on the lookout atop a 100 foot fire tower in northern Alberta.Trina Moyles
There’s an assumption that a human in a fire tower, scanning the landscape for smoke and making informed decisions often based on years of experience, is outdated and inefficient, but this often isn’t science-based thought. I’d argue that it’s convenient rhetoric for defunding lookout programs.
People forget that firefighters today still rely on technology that’s even older than lookouts: A commonly used tool known as the Pulaski, for example, was in use as early as 1876. A combination of a fire axe and hoe, the Pulaski allows firefighters to chop or dig with the flick of a wrist.
But questions around the future of fire towers are hardly anything new: Fire towers have been under scrutiny for nearly a century, Mr. Klein points out. “Ever since they invested a little bit of money and built something other than a couple of trees with a ladder on it, lookouts have been under review.”
When I started with Alberta Wildfire in 2016, there were 128 staffed fire towers in Alberta. In 2019, the UCP government cut Alberta Wildfire’s budget by 9 per cent, which included eliminating staff at 30 fire towers. The province was “modernizing” wildfire detection, Devin Dreeshen, then the minister of agriculture and forestry, told the public.
But that so-called modernity has left holes in Alberta’s detection system. In September, 2022, I saw a smear of smoke on the far horizon from a wildfire burning out of control in the Slave Lake District. The fire had ignited only a few kilometres from Talbot Lake Lookout, one of the towers permanently cut. An aerial patrol discovered the fire at 30 hectares in size. It grew to 90 hectares by the end of the day. The lookout at Talbot Lake would’ve caught it at 0.01 hectares. How much would it have cost Albertans to staff the lookout compared with the cost of managing a 90-hectare wildfire? One drop of fire retardant from aircraft alone is nearly one-third of a lookout’s seasonal wages, for example.
B.C. began to decommission its lookout program in the 1980s, in part because of deteriorating facilities and unsafe working conditions. Although the province recently invested in restoring lookouts for historic and tourism purposes, there’s only a few actually used for detection today. More than 40 per cent of wildfires in B.C. are reported by the general public, says Emelie Peacock, an information officer with the BC Wildfire Service. The agency also relies on a lightning-detection service provided by Environment Canada. “After lightning moves through an area, the local fire centre may patrol the area with fixed-wing aircraft to look for any signs of wildfires,” Ms. Peacock explains.
One former Alberta Wildfire firefighter I spoke with, who didn’t want to use his name as he’s currently employed as a firefighter in B.C., commented that while fixed-wing aircraft can cover a larger geography, they are often moving too fast to effectively monitor and catch wildfires. He pointed out that lightning fires often ignite, then smoulder out of sight, deep in the peat. They’re easy to miss.
The coverage that a fire tower provides is unparalleled, he told me.
Delayed detection makes his job as an initial attack firefighter infinitely more challenging. When wildfires are detected beyond a size of 0.5 hectares, they likely need to call for additional resources. And that’s when things get extremely costly – and crews become exhausted.
Wildfire agencies in Northern Canada rely heavily on imaging from heat sensors on board NASA satellites, including MODIS and VIIRS, to assess and monitor wildfires in remote areas. But the current U.S. satellite sensors aren’t necessarily an effective means of providing early detection, Mr. Flannigan explains, but rather “situational awareness.” The same can be said for drones, which are currently used by managers to monitor wildfires after they’ve been reported.
The MODIS sensor, outfitted on the Terra satellite, was designed to serve the continental United States rather than Canada, so its orbit doesn’t provide up-to-the-minute data when Canadian wildfire managers need them most – during the midday peak-burning period. (In 2029, the Canadian Space Agency will launch WildFireSat, which will provide faster, more efficient data relevant to Canadian wildfire managers. This could be a game-changer, Mr. Flannigan says.)
But size also matters. Satellite imagery can’t catch fires as small as the human eye can. “Most of the satellites won’t pick up a campfire from space,” he says.
In some parts of Canada where wildfires can burn in vast wilderness zones without risk to human settlements, including the Yukon, that’s not always an issue. Yukon’s Wildland Fire Management monitors a wilderness zone of 37 million hectares, whereas the area around communities adds up to only 245,000 hectares, says Mike Fancie, an information officer with Yukon Wildfire.
But while the Yukon uses satellite imagery to detect and monitor blazes in more remote areas, it also continues to staff five fire towers, strategically positioned around communities.
“The places we care the most about are the places where lookouts are stationed,” Mr. Fancie says. “A fire near, say, Dawson City needs to be dealt with quickly – and the lookout is proud of his ability to catch smokes fast so crews can get on them before they get large.”
There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to methods of wildfire detection, Mr. Fancie says, but Yukon lookouts continue to play a vital role where the stakes are the highest: on the front lines of communities.
During her seven years as a lookout, Trina Moyles was often asked me why she hadn’t been replaced by cameras or satellites. But staffed towers are the still best method for preventing catastrophic wildfires.Trina Moyles
Over the past year, I’ve been contacted twice by a fire tech company developing automated lookout towers. Somewhat irritated to be asked to offer up information for a technology intended to replace me and my colleagues, I haven’t responded.
But the question of AI technology in wildfire detection is a valid one. There’s been an explosion of fire tech companies, Mr. Flannigan says, and Canadian agencies are inundated with vendor requests.
“Fire is a big business today,” says Fritz Lübbe, chief executive officer of Everseek, a Chile-based company that manages Firehawk Detection in North and South America. Firehawk promises to “detect, validate, and report wildfires within minutes of ignition,” using fixed cameras mounted on towers and AI technology. Since developing its detection algorithm in 2018, the company has exploded. It works mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with 450 monitoring systems in Australia, South America and Africa.
In the summer of 2022, Firehawk was one of six companies that participated in a detection challenge in Alberta, facilitated by Alberta Wildfire, to test different wildfire-detection systems against the performance of a human lookout. All systems were installed at a lookout north of Slave Lake, a town that suffered $700-million in insurable losses from a wildfire in 2011.
The study measured the performance of detection distance, reporting speed and location accuracy, and, in all instances but one, the human lookout came out on top. The lookout outperformed the AI systems in the efficient detection of smokes within 40 kilometres, including a wildfire 46 kilometres away, which no other system detected.
I felt satisfied – although not at all surprised – upon hearing the results. It isn’t about just seeing smoke, it’s about knowing how to see and interpret smoke in a highly localized area. The report agreed with this logic, citing that of the six systems, those that involved “human operation” were the most successful at wildfire detection. Firehawk employs human technicians to verify AI’s potential detections, for example.
“We were 5,000 kilometres away,” Mr. Lübbe says. “We always theorized that we can probably set up anywhere in the world and start up the dispatch here in Chile and monitor it successfully.”
Certainly AI technology could have a beneficial role to play in regions where fire towers don’t exist, but where they do, it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for human intelligence.
Besides, AI solutions won’t come cheap. Detection systems come with massive capital costs: equipment, towers and the salaries of technicians to maintain them. Many fire towers are located in remote areas without road accessibility. Flying a technician out to repair a detection system damaged by, say, lightning or hail would cost thousands of dollars in helicopter airtime alone (rates range from $1,000 to $4,500 an hour depending on the helicopter, with a minimum flight time of three hours). By comparison, the average monthly salary of a lookout in Alberta is around $4,500.
It also begs a fundamental question: Whom do we want to be watching over our communities and sharing vital information on weather and wildfire? A trained lookout in a fire tower who knows the local landscape – and also people in the community – or an outsourced worker, monitoring a computer screen, halfway around the world?
Human lookouts care about community and forests in a way that AI technology will never be capable of. In the Age of the Pyrocene, this has never mattered more.