Firefighting in Germany with Topcon GNSS Receivers

April 24, 2022 Topcon

The firefighters who work as part of disaster response teams do not always extinguish fires. Sometimes they also set fires themselves, in order to protect cultural landscapes. When they record the burned areas electronically afterwards, the simple means are the best. Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire to protect the landscape. The Lüneburg Heath in the north of Germany is a good example. This unique cultural landscape typified by its low-lying heather dates back 3,000 years when Stone Age farmers settled here with their livestock. In clearing the land, they eliminated the existing forests and created these broad stretches of open land with their characteristic low-lying vegetation pattern.

Preserving a Historic Cultural Landscape Using Gnss Receivers

Normally such spaces would already be re-conquered by natural forests within a few decades. In order to prevent that, a hardy breed of moorland sheep known as the “Heideschnucke” has been set out to graze here. But today they can no longer handle the task alone.

That’s why controlled fires are also being set, in order to preserve the landscape of the heath. These operations are conducted by volunteers from the organisation “@fire for International Disaster Response.”

Their operational forces primarily fight devastating forest and brush fires, in southern European countries, for example, or provide emergency aid to the local populace after earthquakes and other natural disasters. But they also implement preventive measures against wildfires and conduct such landscape protection operations at the request of landowners or environmental officials.

“When we set a fire in the heath landscape, the knee-high heather is perfectly capable of launching flames eight metres (26 ft) in the air,” says Detlef Maushake of @fire Germany. “With the right tactics, a dozen fire-fighters can easily keep such a fire under control, even in high winds.”

Many @fire volunteers also work as full-time professionals for fire brigades and emergency rescue services. So in their volunteer operations they also use those same methods which professional firefighters apply elsewhere to fight wildland fires: they observe the wind, fight fire with fire, and cut firebreaks into the landscape in order to starve the flames of fuel.

Firefighting in Germany with Topcon GNSS Receivers

Recording GNSS Surface Area Data Easily

Upon completion of their operation, the disaster response teams must then make a record of the burned areas. They use the compact, handy GRS-1 from Topcon. Detlef Maushake explains, “This rover system enables me to record geodata very easily and take photos in order to measure the surface area of the burned terrain. With the push of a button, I create a new project and then I select the function “Record area”. Then I proceed along the fire line and the device records it automatically. After that I enter the command “Close area” and the system shows the recorded area with the coordinates and the surface area within it.” The firefighters from @fire can send those data in electronic form to the land management or forestry officers and to the landowners.

From his experience as training manager for @fire, Detlef Maushake knows that the simple methods are often the best ones when it comes to disaster response. “Personally, I’m a professional firefighter and not a geodata specialist,” he says. “But Veit Kratzenberg of Topcon Germany is also actively involved as an emergency responder with @fire. It only took him 15 minutes to show me the GRS-1 and now I can explain the system to my colleagues in a just few minutes too.”

Firefighting in Germany with Topcon GNSS Receivers

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