Canyon Fire

A canyon fire in Los Angeles County on the afternoon of July 7, 2007. The 600 acre, wind-driven fire threatened dozens of homes, however, none were lost due to the aggressive efforts of the ground crews, dozers and aerial resources. Among the air responders was an Air Attack 330, four California Fire (CAL Fire) S2T airtankers, one BLM SEAT tanker, one S-64 Skycrane from USFS, and six local agency helicopters.

CAL Fire works extensively with HPWREN (High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network) on various aspects of data communication for fire incidents, and have experimented with setups that could eventually provide data communications to the airplane that manages the air drops (like the one pictured).

HPWREN is a National Science Foundation-funded network research program that also functions as a collaborative cyberinfrastructure on research, education and first responder activities. It includes creating, demonstrating and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. The network includes backbone nodes at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University campuses, and a number of "hard to reach" areas in remote environments. (Date of Image: July 7, 2007)