As California grapples with increasingly deadly wildfires with seemingly few real solutions, one small but effective way of saving communities is getting more attention and traction: deploying a network of infrared cameras on mountaintops and other high hazard areas.

The AlertWildfire network, consisting of some 80 cameras already dispersed among California forests, has already proven its worth on several occasions. As recently as last week in San Diego County, cameras caught two fire start-ups and allowed fire personnel to put them down with the appropriate amount of manpower.

Last December, cameras helped keep the Lilac Fire under 5,000 acres by allowing fire personnel to make key decisions early, before the fire got out of hand.

“The likelihood of pinning down that fire without a massive response was low,” said Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Lab in Reno, Nev., and a chief architect of the AlertWildfire camera network. “In that case, it could have been the difference between a billion dollars or not.”

So far, the network stretches from California and Nevada to small slices of Oregon and Idaho. Data from the cameras is sent to the Amazon Web Services cloud. “We basically build microwave networks to bring back the data in real time on a redundant network, so we can sustain some level of failure,” Kent said. “We ultimately bring that into Linux servers, then put that data into Amazon Web Services cloud.”

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