By Mary Jo Wagner, freelance writer, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Bielby says the heightened spatial awareness the imagery provides has helped remove the guesswork of what’s on the ground for fire leaders, subsequently increasing their comfort levels and enabling them to plan attack strategies based on what’s there. Unlike the past, when crews have dropped into areas blind, fire personnel now have detailed views of wildfire areas in advance that show them where they’re going and where to run when they hit the ground.


A Clearing in the Forest
Northwestern Ontario, which boasts 45 percent of the provincial total of productive forest, is the “Forest Capital of Canada,” a designation it was awarded six years ago. Forty percent of Ontario’s landmass of 107 million hectares belongs to the AFFM’s WFR. A 43.2 million-hectare area that borders Manitoba in the west, stretches 700 kilometers east to Marathon and runs 650 kilometers to the north, the WFR is heavily wooded with predominantly boreal forest, including spruce, balsam fir, jack pine, birch and cedar species.

With such an immense inventory of productive forest, 40 percent of the WFR land is licensed to timber companies such as Weyerhauser, Bowater, Domtar and Buchanan. The remaining 60 percent north of these licensed areas is where community life directly abuts the heavily forested backdrop. About 20 First Nation communities, ranging from 500 to 3,000 residents, are interspersed under this massive blanket of green, living in relative isolation of each other. Structurally the communities offer few, if any, firebreaks.

Protecting such high-value assets sits with the AFFM’s 101 four-person crews and 36 pilots summoned every fire season to defend the region’s natural and human life. In 2005 the WFR suffered 518 wildfires that burned more than 31,000 hectares; halfway into 2006’s official fire season that began on April 1, the region had seen more than 500 fires—at least 10,000 hectares burned. According to Debbie MacLean, an information and communication specialist with the OMNR, lightning sparked the majority of these fires.

Though fire personnel can’t predict where those lightning strikes will ignite fire, they know they are inevitable. The best way firefighters can mitigate value loss is effective planning. For the past 10 years AFFM staff have been steadily loading a GIS with myriad fire-related data layers such as region maps, fire statistics, 15-meter Landsat-based fuel classification maps, forest inventories and First Nation community information to help improve their knowledge with each passing fire season.

When creating this database it became increasingly apparent that there was a large information gap for the northern 60 percent of the WFR. Detailed forest inventories, fuel classifications and topographic maps were available and integrated for the licensed forest areas, but that same level of detail was lacking for the rest of the region.

The only spatial awareness staff have had of this region—apart from being on the fire line—has come from 1:250,000 and 1:50,000 topographic maps and 15-year-old aerial photos. And those photos are maintained at the AFFM’s Regional Fire Centre in Dryden, not in the GIS. That dearth in intelligence has challenged the AFFM to meet its mandate to protect human life, structural values and economic-invested areas.

“More critical than acquiring better topographic maps was a way to replace our aging photos,” explains Bielby. “We needed something that was current that had enough detail to show structures and waterways, but also something that we could tie into our GIS software.

“That’s when the QuickBird program was born,” he adds.

More than a Pretty Picture
In 2003, Bielby and colleagues began testing a wide range of optical satellite imagery before settling on QuickBird.

“Every time I received a new image I showed my fire response colleagues, and they continually asked for better accuracy and more detail,” says Bielby. “Ultimately we want to have an image that clearly shows structural buildings, infrastructure and waterways, because if a wildfire is threatening a community, we want to know how far the water source is to the structure so we can efficiently dispatch equipment. If you know that it’s 200 feet to the closest river then you know you need to send a pump and ‘X ‘ amount of hose. With that amount of detail we could eliminate a lot of guesswork before crews are activated.

“When I purchased our first QuickBird image in 2003 our response teams again reviewed it and they deemed it excellent,” he continues. “It showed all the detail we need. And it was functional with our GIS.”

The first image they acquired of a small First Nation community called Kasabonika didn’t arrive in time to help fire managers suppress a 650-square-kilometer blaze that forced all 720 residents from their homes; however, it did prove fortuitous that fall when the same community suffered a major flood. The remote town 600 kilometers north of Thunder Bay sits on an island and is only accessible via one gravel airport runway. Using the QuickBird scene, emergency responders were able to project the flood water’s course, quickly locate suitable shelters and transport residents to safety.

Bielby says that image proved how beneficial such spatial knowledge can be for responders and revealed that it could offer much more value than just a simple replacement for their dated aerial photo archive—the original intention of the QuickBird program.

“We understood quickly that we could use the imagery as an underlay in our GIS to prepare community forest fire protection plans of all areas within these images,” he says.

In 2004, the AFFM acquired QuickBird imagery of the remaining pockets of northern First Nation communities through MDA Geospatial Services Inc. (www.mdacorporation.com/geospatial), a QuickBird reseller based in Richmond, British Columbia. To date, the agency has purchased 216 images and has 5 percent (22,350 hectares) of the WFR’s most remote and inaccessible areas covered.

“The AFFM is developing an ideal application for QuickBird imagery—mapping small, remote and isolated regions that are difficult to access and image efficiently with the conventional means,” says Tor Henderson, sales manager at MDA Geospatial Services. “As most of these communities are quite small, they can readily visualize all of their high-value assets from one image to help them identify risks and prepare protection plans.”

Proactive Planning
With the high-resolution imagery serving as backdrops in the GIS, Bielby and colleagues are committed to creating forest fire protection plans to better prepare for the fire season. On each image they are identifying all key geographical, topographical and structural values such as roads, trails, waterways, schools, airports, buildings, slope grades, and forest type and cover. Using these base maps, coupled with other ancillary data, personnel run simulations to model various fire scenarios to better prepare response and attack strategies.

“Modeling fire situations enables us to better understand what would be required to protect a certain community,” says Bielby. “For example, coupling the terrain, fire fuel and tree canopy values with the road access and waterway structural values, we can quickly model how a fire will burn and calculate how many pumps, hose and other resources we’ll need to protect the community. That allows us to increase greatly our level of preparedness. And in the event of a fire, we can immediately pull up the relevant image, and reference where the community is and where major investment areas and structures are so we know what resources we’ll need and where to place them, and if need be, where and how to evacuate residents.”

Such clear foresight is new to fire leaders and is providing them and their fire crews with a new level of comfort. According to MacLean, the imagery already is credited with improving fire personnel’s initial attack response, ultimately helping crews suppress fires more quickly and mitigate losses.

Preparedness in the Field
A wildfire in mid-June 2006 is a case in point. A blaze broke out in the small town of Angling Lake 80 kilometers north of Kasabonika. As soon as the fire call came in, staff in AFFM’s intelligence unit retrieved a QuickBird image of the area from the GIS and overlaid all supporting GIS data, including the boundaries of the initial fire perimeter. Using a combination of ground truth and fuel layers, they ran predictive simulations to model where the fire would likely move with the current wind conditions and weather indices. Fortunately, wind conditions for the community were favorable, but from the simulation they predicted the fire would grow to a certain size and would put certain areas to the south at risk. Fire leaders were able to prepare for the fire, planning attack and suppression strategies and maneuvering personnel and equipment accordingly.

“The imagery is giving the necessary specialists the tools to better predict where the fire is going to burn, and reveals geographical features like waterways, certain terrain or even fuel types that could assist us in fighting the fire,” says Bielby. “We wouldn’t have this critical information without the aid of the imagery.”

Fire crews had similar success at another mid-June wildfire about 180 kilometers south of Kasabonika that was threatening the First Nation community of Eabametoong (formerly known as Fort Hope). Using the GIS-overlaid QuickBird imagery and subsequent fire behavior prediction intelligence, fire leaders were able to develop effective attack strategies and resource allocations to efficiently and safely fight the fire.

 
Having the QuickBird imagery as a backdrop has greatly enhanced the AFFM’s real-time mapping abilities as well. Although GIS mapping has become as commonplace as hose, pumps and water bombers and is an integral part of incident command posts, with only topographic maps for reference, map making could still be a time-consuming process.

Typically when crews return to base camp they begin to draw the fire scene on a white board or large paper maps—where the perimeter is, where helipads are, new base camps—and during the next five hours the mapper plots those points to a map in the GIS and prints them for fire bosses the next day. With the new imagery, the mapper can produce more accurate maps much quicker.

Now when crews return from the bush, they hand their Global Positioning System (GPS) units to the mapper. While the data are downloading, the teams point to the digital QuickBird image on screen and provide the mapper with updates and changes. Because the information can be digitized in real time, map making is limited only by the speed of the printer.

“When you pull up the topographic maps there is a bit of doubt in their accuracy, and it can still be hard to visualize the scene,” qualifies Bielby. “With a QuickBird image, there’s no doubt that what they see is what is there. So they can quickly point to the image and say the perimeter has moved over here, new helipad locations are here, we’ve created a bulldozer line over here and we’ve set up a few other base camps for evening crews here. Not only is that a more efficient way to map a fire, it also allows everyone to see the whole fire and what it’s doing across different sections.”

As the 2006 fire season nears its official close, it will be time for AFFM personnel to assess, reflect and plan for 2007. At the heart of that planning effort will be the continual preparation of forest fire protection plans. According to Bielby, high-resolution satellite imagery will form the backbone of those plans. Fire personnel will likely take comfort in that.

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