![]() ![]() “Our towers always spot the smoke quicker,” he said. John Hecker, manager of the Moshannon Forest District, said the alternative is paying upwards of $1,000 per hour for a plane to search for fires. That’s one of the reasons why five of the new towers are in the Moshannon Forest District. “There’s other places in north-central Pennsylvania especially where no one will see a fire for a couple hours.”Įven if someone wanted to report a fire, they’d have a hard time finding cell service in the Pennsylvania Wilds. “There are a lot of places where if people see smoke, they will get 10 calls to the 9-1-1 center,” said Mike Kern chief of the division of forest fire protection for the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which oversees the forest districts. He estimates 500 are still staffed, as states turn to other methods of fire detection like planes, cameras and citizen reports from cell phones. “Nationwide, we figure there were somewhere over 9,000 lookout structures built along the way and probably a little over 2,500 actually left standing, but a lot of those are just abandoned,” Weber said. Pennsylvania is the only state recently to build new towers on such a scale. Over the past few decades, Weber has seen many states end their lookout programs. ![]() “My first reaction was, ‘Really?’” he said. Gary Weber, treasurer of the national Forest Fire Lookout Association, was surprised by the project. …This spring marks the first fire season for the 16 new towers built in Pennsylvania last year. They will be safer to ascend, with improved stairs and railings, and be topped with weather-proof cabs.īelow is an excerpt from an article at National Public Radio: The new fire towers are sturdier to meet today’s structural and foundation code requirements. Many of the original towers still in operation today were constructed in the 1920s through 1940 and needed to be replaced. In September 2017, began a $4.6 million Department of General Services capital project to replace 16 forest fire lookout towers on state forest land. While most land managers are abandoning their fire lookout towers or installing electronic systems to detect wildfires, the state of Pennsylvania is going old school. of Conservation and Natural Resources photo. ![]() The new 40-foot fire lookout tower at Big Pocono State Park in Monroe County, PA is one of 16 that are replacing old towers. ![]()
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