$30 million awarded to fund wildfire-monitoring planes proven in major disasters

Pilot Reinhard Schmidt in the Fire Integrated Real-time Intelligence System (FIRIS) airplane on the tarmac at Burbank Airport Tuesday, May 10, 2022. The state Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), the L.A. city fire department and the Orange County Fire Authority held a media availability to demonstrate the state-of-the-art “FIRIS” airplane equipped with high-def and infrared cameras. The plane can be sent anywhere in California and can send real-time images, information, and projections to first responders and emergency managers on the ground.

Planes capable of predicting the behavior of wildfires and beaming information directly to crews on the ground in real time have proven invaluable in major disasters across California. Now, they will become a permanent part of firefighters’ arsenals, after attracting millions of dollars in state funding, officials announced Tuesday, May 10.

Gov. Gavin Newsom will announce plans to allocate $30 million to the Fire Integrated Real time Intelligence System (FIRIS)  when he unveils California’s revised budget on Friday, May 17, according to officials from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

The system was conceptualized about six years ago in conversations between General Atomics, a Department of Defense Contractor known for designing the predator drone, and Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy.

He was the Chief of the San Diego Fire Department at the time, and had been asked to create a real-time aerial surveillance system for wildfires by the city’s then-mayor, Kevin Faulconer.

Fennessy continued working with General Atomics to develop FIRIS after becoming OCFA Chief. The concept garnered funding for a pilot program, which eventually led to the debut of the system’s first plane.

“What we’ve learned is … (it) has to be easy, it has to be quick, and it has to be real-time,” Fennessy said Tuesday during a news event at a privately owned airstrip in Burbank. “Any information 10 minutes late, 15 minutes late, 30 minutes late, it’s old information.”

In the past, crews mapping out the progress of fires were required to land and manually upload their data. That meant that firefighters’ plan of attack against a wildfire had often been based on conditions that may have already changed drastically.

The key components of the FIRIS system are two Beechcraft King 200 planes outfitted with state-of-the-art sensors. The technology gives crews the ability to detect heat and see in the dark and through thick plumes of smoke, even in the dark, Orange County Mission Commander Stan Kubota said.

Crews aboard the planes send live updates on a fire’s spread and intensity directly to the cell phones of firefighters on the ground. That allows those coordinating disaster response to send teams where they are most needed sooner, hopefully before lives and structures are threatened.

“Historically, our strike teams were getting into these fires blind,” Cal OES Director Mark Ghilarducci said Tuesday. “They didn’t know what they were getting into, and were listening to the news or maybe the radio. But now they can actually see what the fire is doing. From a safety standpoint, that’s huge for firefighters.”

The FIRIS system has also been critical in determining which communities need to be evacuated during recent wildfires in Southern California. And it has helped search for missing persons and was used to track the spread of a major oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach in 2021.

The FIRIS system’s two planes cover the entire state, and had each cost between $14 million and $16 million annually to operate, according to Fennessy’s estimate. Both spend hundreds of hours in flight each year, and may see even more use as the program expands and first responders discover more ways to take advantage of them.

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