Mountaintop cameras are the newest tool for finding wildfires, and unlike human lookouts, the cameras are on duty all the time.

The hundreds of cameras across the West that make up the Alert Wildfire system are mainly in remote areas where there aren’t people around to watch for wildfire smoke around the clock.

“These cameras are actually posted at places where our radio sites are,” said Andy Robertson, manager of the fire dispatch center at the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Vale District. “So there wouldn’t be anybody there. They are definitely a nice tool to have, especially in the very remote places that we have here.”

Five of the cameras are in the southeast part of Oregon, but the BLM hopes to install two, and possibly three, cameras this year in Northeastern Oregon, including two in Baker County, Robertson said.

The planned camera sites are Lookout Mountain in eastern Baker County north of Huntington, Beaver Mountain, east of Dooley Mountain and Highway 245, and Cottonwood Mountain west of Vale.

Three universities oversee the Alert Wildfire program — University of Oregon, University of Nevada at Reno, and University of California at San Diego.

There are two different ALERTWildfire websites — one with live camera footage for the public to view, with the camera rotating every 30 seconds, and a second site for fire managers, which allows them to control the camera.

Although nobody actively monitors the cameras all the time, fire officials try to take a good look at the full rotation once every hour. Robertson said he displays the camera views on a large display screen at the Vale Dispatch Center so people can keep an eye on what’s happening.

Footage from cameras in Oregon, Idaho and Washington is available on the same webpage. Viewers can select which location they want to focus on and zoom in and out, as well as play a time lapse of the past 15 minutes, one hour, three hours, six hours or 12 hours.

ALERTWildfire started with ALERTTahoe, a pilot program in which cameras were installed around Lake Tahoe. The network grew into Oregon, Washington and Idaho after success during the summers of 2014-16, and 300 new cameras were installed in the western region of the country during the 2020 wildfire season. This year, ALERTWildfire is expected to install more than 175 new cameras across five states.

From 2016-2020, the cameras helped firefighters find or monitor more than 1,500 wildfires. Robertson hopes to have nearly as many cameras installed in Oregon as there are in California, where multiple cameras can get different angles.

The Oregon Department of Forestry also maintains a network of fire-detection cameras. One of those, on Monument Mountain in Grant County, helped firefighters pinpoint the Lovlett Corral Fire on the Umatilla National Forest about 10 miles northwest of Monument on Tuesday, June 29.