Graham Kent

ALERT Wildfire, a consortium of universities (University of Nevada, Reno, University of California San Diego, and the University of Oregon) integrating state-of-the-art Pan-Tilt-Zoom fire cameras and associated tools to help firefighters and first responders, is currently partnered with numerous state and federal wildfire agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior. Leveraging these weapons against devastating blazes is just one of the contributions to smarter emergency management from project lead Dr. Graham Kent, Director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory and Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. Previous to July 2009, he was a Research Geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and had been Director of the Visualization Center at Scripps from 2001-2009. Kent has conducted a variety of studies around the globe, including tsunami and ocean bottom seismic research. He’s mapped earthquake faults beneath Lake Tahoe that have produced tsunamis and most recently has placed important constraints on southern San Andreas Fault recurrence times through mapping cross faults beneath the Salton Sea. More recently, his research interests include mapping fault hazards offshore of Southern California in association with nuclear storage at San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station and evaluating geohazards associated with the California High Speed Rail program. Kent brought the ShakeOut earthquake drill to Nevada in 2010 (the first state to join California) and spearheaded AlertTahoe, a public and private program to bring earthquake early warning to the Tahoe region and build out a fire camera network for early detection of ignition in the basin. Together, this system is designed to provide hardened communications for ‘all hazards’ through a redundant mesh microwave network. The real-time axis cameras have scored early successes in alerting fire personnel of the earliest stages of fire ignition at Tahoe and, more recently, in central Nevada as part of a parallel Wildland Fire Camera network funded by the Bureau of Land Management. In the inaugural year (2015), more than two dozen fires were either discovered or early intel was provided in Tahoe and central Nevada; in 2016, this number jumped to 108 fires.