Sometimes disasters move too quickly, even for the latest technology to catch.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Kimberly Adams.

California relies on a variety of tools to help stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low

tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on flames. But on the higher tech side is a new

AI-powered monitoring system designed to detect and report wildfires at high speeds using a network

of over 1,000 cameras and sensors called Alert California, developed at the University of

California, San Diego. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across California

during the 2023 fire season, in several cases, getting

info to authorities faster than usual.

But not this fire.

Saruse Faravar is a senior writer at Forbes and recently explored how the conditions of the

Palisades fire were just too much for that AI system. I think what is worth noting, and what any fire professional will tell you, is that these

conditions in this particular fire, where you had extremely high winds, we're talking 80, 90,

100 miles per hour winds, you had very kind of steep, difficult terrain topography. If a fire gets

going in those conditions, especially when the brush and flammable materials on the ground

are extremely dry, right? Anyone who's been in Southern California within the last six to 12 months

will tell you there's been very, very little rain. So you have a lot of kind of

worst case scenario conditions, which is what the National Weather Service has said. And so did the

cameras capture the early stages of the fire? Yes, they did. But was that warning enough to

mitigate the growth of this particular fire? No, it was not. You know, Mother Nature

pretty quickly overwhelmed 21st century artificial intelligence here. Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world,

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