The next time a fire sparks on the horizon, Marin County firefighters and residents alike will have a better view. The county’s fire camera system, overhauled this year, features cameras at six sites whose feeds can be viewed not only by the fire department but also by regional stakeholder agencies and the public. Cameras offer critical aid, allowing agencies to quickly identify the existence of a fire, its location and the potential needs of firefighters on the ground, said Marin County Deputy Fire Chief Mark Brown. “If I have an image of the fire, I can anticipate what the incident commander needs and move resources before the commander asks for it,” he told the Light. Marin has had cameras in place since 2014, but it joined together with neighboring counties after the North Bay fires to build a comprehensive network. The result is a collaboration with Sonoma and Napa Counties, PG&E and ALERTWildfire. Previously, if the fire department took control of a camera in its command center, the live imagery would only be available in that center; for the general public, the portal would remain frozen on the last image the camera sent out before the center took control. The latest cameras, which PG&E installed at a cost of $5,000 apiece, are located on Mount Tamalpais East, Mount Tamalpais West, Big Rock Ridge between San Rafael and Novato, Barnabe Peak East, Barnabe Peak West and Mount Vision. The county plans to add a seventh camera on Mount Burdell in Novato and potentially add five to six additional cameras over the next few years. Without camera imagery, said Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory and ALERTWildfire’s project director, dispatchers are often flying blind. “They have to assume a person calling 911 is actually looking at a fire, or that he or she isn’t geographically challenged—which has happened,” he said. He added that giving residents access to camera feeds is also “a double-edged sword.” “Sometimes cameras can be great—people can see a threat and go, ‘Wow, I need to get out of here,’” he said. “The downside is that some people may think they can use the intel on the cameras to make their own judgments and not evacuate, so we have to be careful with that.” Toward that end, the fire department plans to make a concentrated effort to educate the public on how to make better judgment calls based on what is seen on feeds. The viewing browser comes equipped with a tweet button, which creates a new window that says that there is a fire at a certain location and tags the twitter handles @NVFireCam and @alertwildfire. According to Mr. Kent, last year two fires located within the program’s coverage area were discovered early because of tweets sent out from the website. Anyone interested in looking at the fire feed should go to alertwildfire.org/northbay/index.html.