How AI could help firefighters extinguish wildfires?

Wildfires are notoriously unpredictable, but that hasn’t stopped Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Ralph Terrazas from spending much of his career trying to outsmart them. As a battalion chief more than 20 years ago, Terrazas was asked to figure out how fast wildfires move. His solution, for which he now holds a patent: a triangular piece of Plexiglas, which firefighters could overlay onto the department’s 800-foot maps to estimate a brushfire’s progress over the next hour-and-a-half.

“It was cumbersome,” says Terrazas, 58, whose department is responsible for protecting 4 million people and 150 square miles of territory, much of it brush vulnerable to blazes that could threaten the city. “But prior to that we had nothing.”