The images repeat every summer: walls of flame, crews on hoses, aircraft banking low over the treeline to drop water.
This year, wildfires across France, Spain and Portugal have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Four men have died fighting the fires in France and around 150 have been injured.
Which raises an obvious question. If drones can replace soldiers in Ukraine, why are people and three-decade-old aircraft still doing this work?
What has actually changed
Chief sergeant Guillaume Millet has 24 years in the job and heads the Fire and Rescue Service branch of the CFDT union in the Gironde, the French region hardest hit this summer.
His answer is that the firefighting itself looks much as it always did. Detection is where the change has happened.
The big shift in his département, Millet says, is AI-assisted cameras watching the forest for the moment a fire starts. Those cameras have taken over from the human lookouts who used to sit in watch towers in every town through the summer, work often done by students.
False alarms have dropped as a result. An AI-assisted camera, he says, can tell smoke from the dust a tractor throws up in a field with near-total confidence. Range is good too: the systems pick up fires as far as 20km (12 miles) away.
The Gironde installation came from a company called Midgard. Elsewhere in France, another French start-up, FireTracking, does the same job.
Fifteen minutes
FireTracking chief executive Jean-Simon Chaudier described what a crew sees when the system triggers. An alert lands on firefighters’ phones, they open the app and get the camera feed at 40 times zoom. Alongside the live video sits a map with the fire’s exact location, any houses nearby and a projection of how it should spread minute by minute given the weather and humidity.
The margin that buys is the whole point. Over one recent ten-day stretch, Chaudier says a firefighter reported that the AI had picked up seven fires roughly 15 minutes before the first phone call came in. Fifteen minutes, in his framing, is the gap between a catastrophe and a fire contained to two or three hectares.
He puts the escalation more bluntly still. After a minute, a glass of water will do it. After two, you need a tank. After three, you are calling in a Canadair, the amphibious aircraft that scoop water from rivers, lakes and the sea and remain the front line of forest firefighting in France and elsewhere.
FireTracking’s cameras currently cover a million hectares, mostly in France. In Indre-et-Loire the company put in 11 detection sites, spending €1.2m (£1m; $1.4m) in total to cover 6,000 sq km (2,300 sq miles). That area is mainly farmland, where crop fires are a serious and costly problem, running at around 300 a year in that département alone.
What comes next
Detection is going to get sharper. The French civil protection service runs a programme called Condor, testing solar-powered drones flying continuous patrols with electro-optical cameras and AI. Other projects put sensors among the trees themselves, including Spain’s SenForFire, which measures gases given off before any flame is visible.
Drones are further behind than you might expect. Millet says France is trialling them for sea rescue, dropping lifebuoys and survival kits, but nothing has reached that stage for fighting fires.
A French start-up called Daidelos is looking for investment to build a heavy-lift, petrol-engine drone capable of hovering over a fire and spraying 1.2 tonnes of water. Others are working on drones that drop grenades designed to burst on contact with extreme heat, scattering a chemical powder that smothers and cools the fire and interrupts its combustion chemistry.
The ambition there is an autonomous first response, with detection and drone launch happening fast enough to kill a fire in its first minutes. Against an established wildfire it would do nothing at all.
French researchers are also developing drones to fly close to the flames, not to fight them but to gather information: smoke behaviour, sudden shifts in weather, the risk of burning trees or buildings collapsing, all of it read before crews go in.
Why the hoses stay
Millet is unsentimental about how much of this helps him. Technology’s usefulness in his line of work is very limited, he says. It finds fires. It does not put them out. That still requires people hauling hoses through a forest to reach the flames.
Aircraft do not change the equation either. When a Canadair drops 6,000 litres, he says, it knocks the intensity down, and then ground crews have to finish what it started.
France has grown used to the sight of Dash planes laying down fire retardant, ammonium phosphate as an orange powder, ahead of the flames to slow the vegetation catching. That is a delaying tactic, not a substitute for water and manpower.
So the technology is finding fires faster and giving crews better information to work with, and it may well make the job less dangerous before long. Replacing the crews is another matter.
It is always the firefighters on the ground with the hoses who put the fire out, Millet says. That has held true since the first modern fire brigade was formed in the Netherlands in the 1670s, and he does not expect it to change any time soon.
