From California to Australia. You've likely seen the familiar scenes of fires burning out of control and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
That destruction led 16-year-old Neil Suri of Oakton, Virginia to innovation.
For the past year the Oakton High School junior has been developing a forest fire detection tool. "It's a camera-based approach to fire detection. On the FireWatch device there are four cameras on the camera hook and these four cameras allow the device to have 360-degree coverage," he said. According to Suri, 13 of the FireWatch devices are installed near Virginia's Shenandoah National Forest and monitor 600,000 acres.
"In early March I was able to detect a real fire which has been a high point," Suri said.
The low-cost monitoring system won the First Place Grand Prize at the Virginia State Science and Engineering Fair.