Fire Lookout Tower 05
Fire Lookout Tower 05 : United States: The heyday of fire lookout towers was from 1930 through 1950. During World War II, the Aircraft Warning Service was established, operating from mid-1941 to mid-1944. Fire lookouts were assigned additional duty as Enemy Aircraft Spotters, especially on the West Coast of the United States. From the 1960s through the 1990s the towers took a back seat to new technology, aircraft, and improvements in radios. The promise of space satellite fire detection and modern cell phones tried to compete with the remaining fire lookout towers, but in several environments, the technology failed. Fires detected from space are already too large to make accurate assessments for control. Cell phones in wilderness areas still suffer from lack of signal. Today, some fire lookout towers remain in service, because having human eyes being able to detect smoke and call in the fire report allows fire management officials to decide early how the fire is to be managed. The more modern policy is to "manage fire", not simply to suppress it. Fire lookout towers provide a reduction in time of fire detection to time of fire management assessment. Idaho had the most known lookout sites (989); 196 of them still exist, with roughly 60 staffed each summer. Kansas is the only U. S. state that has never had a lookout. A number of fire lookout tower stations located in New York State, particularly near the Adirondack Forest Preserve and Catskill Park, have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They include Arab Mountain Fire Observation Station, Azure Mountain Fire Observation Station, Balsam Lake Mountain Fire Observation Station, Blue Mountain Fire Observation Station, Hadley Mountain Fire Observation Station, Kane Mountain Fire Observation Station, Loon Lake Mountain Fire Observation Station, Mount Tremper Fire Observation Station, Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain Fire Observation Station, Red Hill Fire Observation Station, St. Regis Mountain Fire Observation Station, Snowy Mountain Fire Observation Station, and Wakely Mountain Fire Observation Station
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