ALERTCalifornia — the UC San Diego-CAL FIRE Camera Network Giving Early Warning Ahead of 911 Calls

ALERTCalifornia is a University of California San Diego programme, led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers Neal Driscoll and Falko Kuester, that operates a statewide network of more than 1,200 high-definition, pan-tilt-zoom cameras in partnership with CAL FIRE and the US Forest Service.

The cameras perform a 360-degree sweep roughly every two minutes, use near-infrared sensors for night vision, and can see up to 60 miles by day and 120 miles at night; they are also used after a fire is out to monitor cascading disasters such as the erosion of burned hillsides that have lost their root structure.

In 2025, the platform helped inform CAL FIRE's response to approximately 3,600 wildfire incidents; of 278 wildland-fire dispatches examined, officials were alerted to smoke or fire activity via the camera network before or at the same time as a 911 call in 190 cases, and for at least six fires no 911 call was ever received at all, with early detection keeping every one of those six fires under one acre in size.

Officials describe the value chiefly in terms of speed, since an automated feed flagging a change in smoke colour or density removes the delay otherwise spent verifying a member of the public's 911 report, though neither CAL FIRE nor UC San Diego has published a formal third-party audit of detection accuracy, false-positive rates, or cost-effectiveness relative to the traditional lookout-and-911 model.