Travis County is the first in the country to adopt the new system.<\/p>\n
AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Central Texas fire stations are teaming up with an Australian-based artificial intelligence company, using new technology to predict where fires are most likely to ignite and spread.<\/p>\n
With the touch of a button, fire officials are able to run a scenario simulation through a platform created by FiSci that maps out potential wildfire threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The machine learning tool, called Mitigate, combines real-time environmental and operation data, according to its website.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Travis County is the first county in the country to adopt the system.<\/p>\n
Travis County Rescue Fire Chief Ken Bailey, who provided a demonstration of how the system works, said they plug in the predicted weather.<\/p>\n
“[Saturday] was a high fire danger day, so we wanted to run a simulation to see where we were at most risk to have a larger fire,” said Bailey.<\/p>\n
Bailey said with the simulation, he was able to identify hot spots, and having the information allowed him to create a game plan and send crews out to assess what they would be walking into if a fire had started.<\/p>\n
Travis County Fire Rescue, the Westlake Fire Department, Lake Travis Fire Rescue and the Pflugerville Fire Department will be implementing the tool, which is done through a membership shared among the four. The cost, according Bailey, is less than $1,800.<\/p>\n
“I don’t see any downside now; I don’t think that we should take it at its word,” Bailey said. “I think, you know, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure these things are matching with what’s on the ground.”<\/p>\n
\n“We were thrilled to have them as our partner” <\/p>\n
FiSci explained that the platform is designed to look at terrain and how it could influence fire, as well as vegetation.<\/p>\n
“I think where our tool really, really shines in this kind of context is it shows you where those areas are that you need to be extra aware of in a particular operational period,” said FiSci’s U.S. Technical Account Executive Gregory Vigneaux.<\/p>\n
Vigneaux said the company hopes to expand further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Travis County is the first in the country to adopt the new system. AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Central Texas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-176100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}