2024.06.29. The Fair Economy — The Forest Service and local governments nationwide have installed and are operating 1,446 CCTV cameras for wildfire monitoring, but nearly half — 44.6 percent, or 645 units — were found to lack an auto-rotation function. As a result, CCTV cameras detected only 6 of the 1,684 wildfires that occurred over the past three years, a mere 0.4 percent. Use of the wildfire spread prediction system and information sharing were also found to be inadequate.
The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) recently released an audit report on 'Preparedness for Forest Disasters such as Landslides and Wildfires' containing these findings.
According to the report, the Forest Service required the purchase of CCTV cameras with auto-rotation functions under its "Guidelines on Unmanned Wildfire Surveillance Camera Facilities and Follow-up Management" starting in 2004, but changed the policy in 2011 to also allow the purchase of cameras without auto-rotation functions.
A review by the BAI of the specifications and operational status of the 1,446 installed CCTV cameras as of November 2023 found that only 801 units had auto-rotation capabilities, while the remaining 645 did not.
Furthermore, of the 146 local governments and other entities with auto-rotating CCTVs, 110 (excluding 36) were not using the auto-rotation function: they either did not change the viewing direction at regular intervals or changed it manually and fixed it.
Securing dedicated personnel to monitor the CCTV footage was also neglected. Each year, the Forest Service draws up a "wildfire prevention project plan" calling for wildfire prevention personnel — such as professional wildfire prevention and extinguishing teams and wildfire watchers — to be assigned as dedicated CCTV monitoring staff, but it merely distributes the plan to local governments without checking whether they actually assign and operate such dedicated personnel.
When the BAI examined how 224 local governments and other entities operated their CCTV monitoring personnel, it found that at 84 of them, or 38 percent, public officials monitored CCTV footage alongside other duties, without assigning wildfire prevention personnel such as professional wildfire prevention and extinguishing teams or wildfire watchers as dedicated monitoring staff.
The remaining 140 (62%) had assigned wildfire prevention personnel to their situation rooms, but they were also required to assist with various other tasks, making it difficult to regard them as dedicated CCTV monitoring personnel in practice.
Consequently, of the total 1,684 forest fires that occurred between January 1, 2021, and December 8, 2023, only six resulted in an initial fire report received through CCTV confirmation.
Use and sharing of the "wildfire spread prediction system" were also found to be inadequate.
Although the Forest Service built a system to predict forest fire spread paths in 2007, it did not share the information with local governments. The audit found that local governments had not even been granted access rights to the system.
In addition, of the 68 major wildfires with burned areas of 10 hectares or more over the past three years, the system was not operated at all for 16 of them.
The findings revealed that the system, built with taxpayers' money, had not been properly operated.
Accordingly, the BAI notified the head of the Korea Forest Service to devise measures to ensure that regional forest services and local governments install and use wildfire surveillance cameras with auto-rotation capability, and to guide and supervise the use of wildfire prevention personnel as dedicated monitoring staff.
It also directed the Forest Service to prepare an operation manual for the forest fire spread prediction system and to devise improvement measures to enable information sharing with local governments.
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