By Isabela Nóbrega
In a joint action coordinated by the Federal Government, the Ministry of Defense, through the Management and Operational Center of the Amazon Protection System (Censipam), is helping Chile fight the forest fires that are affecting the central-south zone of the Andean country. Since the 14th of this month, the recently updated Fire Panel platform has been signaling fire events and classifying, in different levels of priority, the outbreaks to be eliminated.
Agility – The Fire Panel, satellite software for monitoring fires and wildfires, allows the field teams to be activated quickly and assertively, resulting in the optimization of the actions and resources used. The qualified information points out the most urgent cases. Among the information made available by the platform are a combination of web maps, optical satellite images, graphs of fire evolution over the days, night images, and the 24-hour fire front.
“This is the first time the Fire Panel is used outside of Brazil. Our technical team worked hard to include the processing of fire detections in Chile, to help fight fires in that region. This tool update, added to the fact that part of the Brazilian team, which was sent to help, already knew the Fire Panel and had already used the software in the last two years, in the fight against fires in Brazil, facilitates the use of the software and makes it possible to better plan the employment of teams in the field,” said the director general of the Operational Management Center, Rafael Costa.
Tool – The Fire Panel, launched by Censipam in 2021, subsidizes the deployment of forest fire fighting teams in the country. The platform offers, as its main product, a fire tracking service based on the grouping of hotspots in individual fire events. The system aggregates different geospatial data, satellite images and properties of the individual events, which, combined with a severity level indicator, allow the tracking of the evolution of the events.
“With the upgrade, the panel today offers several features, such as prioritization of events, updated optical images of the terrain, graphs of the evolution of fires over the days, night images, and the position of the latest detections of the fire fronts. All this information is important to increase the safety of the agents and the effectiveness of the teams in the fight”, adds Rafael Costa.
Support to Chile – Under the coordination of the Ministry of Defense, the Brazilian Air Force sent an aircraft to assist in fighting the fires. The C-130 Hercules has a firefighting system with capacity to carry 12 thousand liters of water. The MAFFS (Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System) is composed of five water tanks and two tubes that protrude from the rear ramp of the plane, at a height of approximately 45 meters, to pour the liquid. The first missions took place on February 11, in the Ñuble region, totaling 60,000 liters of water.
Photos: Censipam/MD *** Translated by the DEFCONPress FYI Team ***