Dehradun: After meticulously studying the apps used by advanced countries like Canada, Australia and South Africa to mitigate forest fires, an Indian Forest Service Officer (IFoS) of Uttarakhand cadre has developed one such and piloted it in the forests of the state.
The recent devastating forest fires in Los Angeles have forced the world to ponder over the serious issue and Uttarakhand is no stranger to such incidents.
It took Haridwar DFO Vaibhav Singh several years to develop the Forest Fire App and it got 31 updates so far. "
"We have succeeded in developing an advanced app after working on it for several years. I have also tested it myself. I first tried it while I was the DFO of Rudraprayag. It was used for controlling forest fires in Rudraprayag from 2020 to 2022," Singh said.
To learn more about its mechanism, Singh travelled to Canada and worked with an ecologist. It took him three months to create a prototype which included a thorough study of the forest fire apps of Australia and South Africa.
The Uttarakhand Forest Department has adopted the Forest Fire App due to its unmatchable features like cutting down the response time to five hours, the exact location of forest fire, tracking the live location of firefighters and the live location of 40 vehicles deployed in the forests.
The information on the app can be updated by the firefighters only when they are within a 500-metre radius of the fire incident and they have to rush to the area of occurrence soon after getting an alert from the app. It will also provide information about those responsible for the wildfire and the forest outpost under which it happened.
Currently, 7,000 forest staff have been linked with the app and self-help groups, panchayats, volunteers and the common people will be brought under it in future. A common man can geo-tag the location in the app the location of the forest fire.
"This app will prove to be better for Uttarakhand. Through it, the forest department can monitor activities across the state through the dashboard in the Integrated Command Center. The status of the forest area including the posts and surveillance towers of the department has also been added to the application. This will provide a lot of convenience to the department," Nishant Verma, APCCF, Forest Department, said.
Not only this, the app will directly send images captured by satellites of wildfires to alert the forest department for its expedited mitigation. After categorising alerts, the department will be able to detect the genuineness of the incident and the types of forets. A collaboration with the Indian Meteorological Department will help the department to get information about the weather conditions of the fire spot.
Presently, the app will be used at the state level and can be used by other states if found efficient.
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