To monitor wildfire activity, Cole Lindsay, an Oregon Department of Forestry multi-mission aircraft operator, views images using data from a short-wave infrared camera. (Kate Kaye Photos) Cole Lindsay was nearly 20 nautical miles in the air Thursday morning above Oregon’s Silver Falls National Park as the massive Beachie Creek Fire burned. Maneuvering a contraption that looked like a tricked-out Microsoft Xbox controller, Lindsay zoomed a camera in on spots along the west edge of the fire ledge. The fire had shape-shifted and smoldered since Wednesday, burning less intensely in some areas.
“You can see those little spots poke out and catch your eye,” said Lindsay, a multi-mission aircraft operator with the Oregon Department of Forestry. “I can zoom right in on it, get coordinates and a map of where it’s at.”
But looking out the window of the small aircraft, dense smoke hovering from the fires burning more than 900,000 acres of land below obscured everything in sight. The only way Lindsay could see through the creamy soot was with the assistance of a thermal image surveillance camera hanging from the plane’s underbelly.
In essence, the camera built by Portland, Ore.-area company FLIR Systems can see through the smoke. It does this by detecting heat using short wave infrared or SWIR thermal imaging, then visualizing the information.
Inside the plane, Lindsay viewed a monitor displaying renderings of heated areas in white on a grey background. His heavy-duty two-handed controller swiveled the camera under the plane, moving it 360 degrees so its sensors could detect heat from any angle miles away anywhere on the ground.
FLIR’s Star SAFIRE 380HD thermal image camera attached on a plane used by the Oregon Department of Forestry.
The forestry department is using this technology for the first time. It began running flights to detect fires in July in its plane equipped with FLIR’s thermal imaging and night vision cameras. Now, the department’s sprawling firefighting force is in full fire support mode.
“Before this technology, it was just using visual line-of-sight and putting aircraft up and looking for fires during the daytime,” said Neal Laugle, ODF’s state aviation manager.
The San Francisco skyline. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Zillow’s recent Urban Suburban Market Report opens by asking: Are people fleeing the cities for greener suburban pastures?
The short answer is no, the report says: “Some faint signals may have emerged in certain places, but by and large, the data show that suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.”
However, those “faint signals” are raising concerns about a potential “mass exodus” in the San Francisco metro area. SFGate called the exodus “real” and “historic,” referencing Zillow data showing that inventory has risen 96% year-over-year in the city proper as new listings during the pandemic have flooded the market.
In contrast, similar cities like Seattle, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have seen declining or flat inventory within and outside the city limits.
“When you step back and look at the bigger picture, it seems that those writing off urban real estate have done so prematurely,” Zillow economist Jeff Tucker said in a statement. “There is some localized evidence of a softer urban market, particularly in the highest-priced markets, San Francisco and Manhattan, and an eye-catching divergence in sale prices, but no evidence of a widespread flight to suburban pastures.”
(Zillow Graphic)
As tech companies and others allow workers to do their jobs remotely for extended periods of time, one theory is that people will abandon the need to live in cities close to work, fleeing to the suburbs, smaller markets or rural destinations for bigger, cheaper houses.
Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman made headlines back in May when he predicted a “seismic demographic shift toward smaller cities” such as Boise, Idaho, and Bozeman, Mont. Zillow also reported in May, on a survey about remote work, that two-thirds of employees who have the option of WFH would consider moving as a result of that change.
But Zillow economist Josh Clark dismissed remote work as the sole reason for what’s happening in San Francisco.
“It may be tempting to credit the city of San Francisco’s inventory boom to the advent of remote work that came with the pandemic, but one only has to look at to San Jose to question that narrative,” Clark told SFGate. “The San Jose metro, which like the city of SF is dominated by tech workers, has not seen a similar rise. Two things that could drive the difference are San Francisco’s density and its smaller share of family households.”
Business Insider’s take on the exodus cited San Francisco’s high cost of living (median home value in the city is $1.45 million) and the fact that everything that makes living in the city enjoyable is now closed or altered because of coronavirus.
When it comes to Zillow’s website, the report found, search behavior shows that suburban and urban listings are generating the same amount of attention in 2020 as they did a year ago. Traffic to Zillow’s mobile apps and websites in the second quarter did reach a record 218 million average monthly unique users, up 12%, and a total of 2.5 billion visits.
The U.S. housing market has rebounded from earlier this year, driven in part by record-low mortgage rates. The U.S. Census reported at the end of July that home ownership rates increased year-over-year from 64% to 68%, the highest level since 2008 and one of the largest increases in history.
To monitor wildfire activity, Cole Lindsay, an Oregon Department of Forestry multi-mission aircraft operator, views images using data from a short-wave infrared camera. (Kate Kaye Photos) Cole Lindsay was nearly 20 nautical miles in the air Thursday morning above Oregon’s Silver Falls National Park as the massive Beachie Creek Fire burned. Maneuvering a contraption that looked like a tricked-out Microsoft Xbox controller, Lindsay zoomed a camera in on spots along the west edge of the fire ledge. The fire had shape-shifted and smoldered since Wednesday, burning less intensely in some areas.
FLIR’s Star SAFIRE 380HD thermal image camera attached on a plane used by the Oregon Department of Forestry.
The San Francisco skyline. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
(Zillow Graphic)