The new detection system for forest fires - smoke alarm or thermometers?

The new detection system for forest fires - smoke alarm or thermometers?

In California alone, hundreds of thousands of acres are burned each year in devastating forest fire events.  These fires are due to lightning strikes, cigarettes, camp fires, and even some people that think its fun to just start a fire in a field of dead greass.  My point is, you can’t prevent it, just like smoking marijuana in America, it is going to happen no matter how much money you throw at it.  So the next step from prevention is reduction, how to reduce these forest fires?  How about some smoke detectors? … or thermometers?

Putting some smoke detectors around the forest that are hooked up to small photovoltaic cells for power could be the first step.  There are a few different types of smoke detectors, but I feel ionization detectors should do the trick.  These simply detect the amount of americium-241 in the air.  Using this system, a message can be relayed to the nearest fire department, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or whoever is in charge of keeping an eye out for these forest fires.

Of course you may be thinking of the obvious flaw: What about campers just making a camp fire.  Well, there will have to be some metrics that will determine if a cry for help should or should not be sent out.  It is in open air, so maybe if a certain amount of americium-241 is detected, then an alarm should be activated.

If that doesn’t please you, then the thermometer idea may float your boat.  The thermometer plan is pretty simple: if a thermometer reaches x degrees, then a possible fire is happening – call help.  You can even put these thermomters like 10 feet in the trees so no camp fire can reach it.