Hilary Franz: We need all the tools in the tool box to solve our wildfire crisis

The destruction from the Los Angeles wildfires is heartbreaking. Lives lost and homes destroyed at a scale we’ve never seen. These fires burning involve tens of thousands of acres, tiny in comparison to wildfires we have fought but massive in the level of loss.

Just a few months ago, wildfires burned in Brooklyn, New York and New Jersey, and last summer, one look at the Western United States one might have thought half of the continent was on fire with fires in Oregon, Washington, California, Montana and British Columbia.

As Washington’s wildfire chief for the past eight years, I have witnessed this crisis year after year. Like other states, the number of catastrophic wildfires has doubled in frequency, magnitude and geography over the past two decades.

Fires are a natural phenomenon – what isn’t natural is the increase in catastrophic wildfires. Extreme heat and wind conditions, annual droughts and dying overstocked forestlands are contributing to these increasing extreme fires. These are consequences of a rapidly changing climate, a century of suppressing natural fire regimes, removal of Indigenous land stewardship and forest management, and the expansion of our wildland urban interface.

What is needed is to bring back pre-21st century approaches while accelerating 21st century technologies.

In Washington, we’re proving the success of this strategy, keeping 95% of our wildfires below 10 acres over the last four years. Indeed, while the number of fires has increased, the number of acres burned is down to early-2000 levels. Taking a proactive approach, we’re accelerating long-standing land management practices like fuels treatments and prescribed fire while deploying innovative technologies in wildfire preparation, prediction and prevention.

Early detection is key to preventing a wildfire from becoming catastrophic. The quicker we spot a fire, the quicker we can contain it. High-definition Pano-AI cameras are providing a critical early-warning system by performing continuous 360-degree sweeps of the landscape. Using AI, they can detect, verify and classify wildfire events in real-time. This gives our wildfire response teams up-to-date time-lapse imagery and information on fire location and movement, enabling a quicker response with greater accuracy and reduced risk.

Fire is unpredictable – not just how it starts but where it spreads. New smart sensor technologies are helping predict fire behavior by quickly analyzing historical data and current environmental conditions like weather patterns, fuel moisture levels, vegetation and topography. These sensors provide high resolution aerial imagery and rapidly streamline data output within minutes of flying over an incident. This information is invaluable in helping keep our communities and firefighters safe, better predicting fire growth and direction, identifying threatened structures, planning evacuation routes, allocating resources and minimizing wildfire impact.

New technologies are also helping prevent extreme wildfires. In Washington, part of our success is our vegetation management and community resilience work. In the past seven years, we’ve restored 940,000 acres of forest, significantly reducing wildfire risk, and we’ve helped thousands of homes through our Wildfire Ready Neighbors program become more resilient to wildfire by home-hardening and creating defensible space.

The recent fires in Los Angeles, as well as the 2023 Oregon Road and Gray fires in Spokane, show that much more needs to be done and much more quickly. Using AI, organizations like Vibrant Planet help communities identify areas most at risk to strategically prioritize vegetation management, prescribed burns and fuel breaks, reducing wildfire intensity and speed and, ultimately, avoiding losses and maximizing community and ecosystem resilience.

These AI-driven initiatives exemplify the power of collaborative public-private partnerships and highlight how emerging technologies can be applied ethically and practically to restore our environment and safeguard our communities. By leveraging technology, we’re able to fight wildfires smarter and safer, and we’re able to work more efficiently and effectively in reducing its destructive impacts.

With a rapidly changing climate and evolving technological landscape, it’s essential for lawmakers to strike a careful balance – ensuring that regulations protect the public without stifling innovations that provide life-saving solutions. Rushed or overly restrictive policies could hinder advancements we desperately need. Leaders must engage with technology experts and emergency responders to guide the development and deployment of these tools, encouraging innovation while prioritizing sustainability, privacy and public safety.

Washington is known for its evergreen forests and its leadership in innovation and technology. With the wildfire crisis growing each year and no time on our side, we must quickly harness technological advancements to respond to wildfires, restore our forests, protect our communities and save lives.

Hilary Franz served as Washington’s wildfire chief and commissioner of public lands from 2017-2025.