The geophysicist who put cameras where nobody was looking, and started beating the 911 call
California, USA · Neal Driscoll, Brent Pascua
Published August 4, 2026
California's worst fires start in the country where no one lives to smell the smoke, so Neal Driscoll made the empty places watched.
The story
The person and the place
Neal Driscoll teaches geology and geophysics at UC San Diego. He also founded and directs ALERTCalifornia, a public safety program based there that has been watching the state since 2017.
The problem Neal cared about
A wildfire is easiest to stop in its first minutes. The ones that get away are usually burning where nobody lives, with no neighbor to smell smoke and nobody to call it in until the fire is already big.
The agency moment
Rather than wait for more eyes, Driscoll and the ALERTCalifornia team pointed a camera network at the backcountry, and after UC San Diego partnered with CAL FIRE in 2023 they had the feeds watched around the clock for the first thin change in smoke color or density. The cameras sweep a full circle about every two minutes and see 60 miles on a clear day, 120 on a clear night. People stayed in the loop on purpose: analysts confirm each detection, which Driscoll says both holds false alarms down and makes the system more accurate over time.
What changed
"The AI that's being run on the cameras is actually beating 911 calls," Driscoll told the Associated Press. By the program's own count, ALERTCalifornia informed CAL FIRE's response to roughly 3,600 wildfire incidents in 2025, and in more than half of them fire officials knew about the smoke before a 911 caller reported it. "We can fight fires in the incipient phase before they get too large," Driscoll says.
Where it led
The network is past 1,200 cameras now, feeding all 21 emergency command centers in the state, and the same footage does a second job after the fire is out. The cameras show the burned slopes where the roots that held the soil are gone, which is where the next disaster tends to start.
"In many cases, we've started a response before 911 was even called, and in a few cases, we've actually started a response, went there, put the fire out, and never received a 911 call." — Brent Pascua, Cal Fire battalion chief, Associated Press
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 4, 2026.