UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 20, 2019. MegaFon and Ural Forest Conservation Air Base introduced online monitoring systems at fifteen more Sverdlovsk Region-based foresters, the telecom company’s press service reports.

MegaFon and the air base first launched the remote video surveillance service to keep track of forest fires as early as 2014, when twenty-four different locations got monitored. This year, cameras arrived in fifteen more spots in Sysert, Nizhniy Tagil, Nevyansk, Tugulym, Sukhoi Log, Tavda, Irbit, Alapayevsk, Kushva, Sotrinsky, Verkhoturye, Berezovsky, Rezh, and Sinyachikha Forestries.

MegaFon had dome cameras with a 360-degree viewing angle fitted onto antenna mast structures in the foresters this year.

‘The equipment will work in any weather in the -50°C to +50°C temperature range. By customer’s order, MegaFon also added the lightning protection system and had the entire set of appliances connected to the existing unified online monitoring system. The system is now in place in seventy-one video surveillance stations in Sverdlovsk Region. This solution makes it possible to check the state of the forests next to towns and villages and ensure real-time-mode data transfer through secure communication channels. A drone that the air base uses to control the forest patches currently outside of the video surveillance zone sends information to the dispatchers’ operating panels instantaneously,’ the company says.

Thanks to this automated monitoring system in place, every one in ten fire outbreaks in Sverdlovsk Region’s forests actually gets prevented from happening. The air base also put out three forest fires thanks to the system in the last month alone.