AI watching nearly 1,300 hilltop cameras is now first to spot 51% of California’s wildfires, its director says

On a July day this year, a small crew drove a dusty mountain road to an old fire lookout on Shadequarter Mountain, 4,000 feet above Visalia, California. The tower was built in 1964 and abandoned in the late 1980s. The crew turned an off-the-shelf deer stand into a tripod, bolted on solar panels, two 80-pound batteries and a Starlink dish, and fixed two cameras in front of the tower’s broken windows. A rancher sometimes runs cattle up there, so local officials agreed to add a short fence. “Cows are heavy,” said Colby Nicholson, the crew’s senior engineering supervisor.

The crew works for Alert California, a UC San Diego program that runs nearly 1,300 cameras on peaks, towers and rooftops across the state’s most fire-prone land. Its budget can approach $14 million a year, mostly from Cal Fire and large utilities.

The clever bit

The clever bit is the software that watches the feeds around the clock. At each site, one camera spins a full circle every two minutes. Since 2023, AI has scanned that footage for smoke and alerted fire officials, who check the live view to rule out fog or a rancher burning debris, then decide how many crews to send. Anyone can watch the same feeds on the Alert California website.

The numbers keep growing. In 2024 the cameras picked up 1,668 of the 7,553 wildfires in Cal Fire’s territory and caught 636 of them before anyone called 911, Cal Fire’s Brian York said. In 2025 the system helped Cal Fire respond to about 3,600 wildfire incidents, and in more than half of them it alerted officials before a 911 caller did, program director Neal Driscoll told Route Fifty. This summer Driscoll told The New York Times that 51% of California wildfires are now first spotted through AI.

The greatest success stories are the fires you’ve never heard about.

— Falko Kuester, co-director of Alert California and engineering professor, UC San Diego, via inquirer.com

Hooray

Hooray: more than half the time, the first alarm about a new California wildfire now comes from AI watching a hilltop camera, which gives crews a head start.

What comes next

Driscoll wants to grow the network to 1,800 cameras to fill blind spots like Soda Canyon in Napa County, where the crew added a camera this June because local fire officials wanted eyes on it.