United States uses an
Osborne Fire Finder to obtain the
azimuth and
distance to a suspected fire. From these measurements he will call in a "Smoke Report." Fire lookout towers predates the
United States Forest Service, founded in 1905. Many townships, private lumber companies, and state forestry organizations operated fire lookout towers on their own accord. The
Great Fire of 1910, also known as the Big Blowup, burned through the states of
Washington,
Idaho, and
Montana. The smoke from this fire drifted across the country to Washington D.C. physically and politically. It caused the five-year-old Forest Service to address new policies regarding fire suppression. The fire created the modern system of fire rules, organizations, and policies. To prevent and suppress fires, the U.S. Forest Service made another rule that townships, corporations and States would bear the cost of contracting fire suppression services. As a result of the above rules, early
fire detection and suppression became a priority. Towers began to be built across the country. While earlier lookouts used tall trees and high peaks with tents for shelters, by 1911 permanent cabins and cupolas were being constructed on mountaintops. Beginning in 1910, the New Hampshire Timberlands Owners Association, a fire protection group, was formed and soon after, similar organizations were set up in
Maine and
Vermont. A leader of these efforts,
W.R. Brown, an officer of the
Brown Company which owned over 400,000 acres of timberland, set up a series of effective forest-fire lookout towers, possibly the first in the nation, and by 1917 helped establish a forest-fire insurance company. In 1933, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formed the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), consisting of young men and veterans of World War I. It was during this time that the CCC set about building fire lookout towers, and access roads to those towers. The U.S. Forest Service took great advantage of the CCC workforce and initiated a massive program of construction projects, including fire lookout towers. In California alone, some 250 lookout towers and cabs were built by CCC workers between 1933 and 1942. 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. Fire lookout towers provide a reduction in time of fire detection to time of fire management assessment.
Idaho had the most known lookout sites (966); 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, including many in New York State near the
Adirondack Forest Preserve and
Catskill Park, have been listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
Japan During the
Edo period in
Japan housed the . Usually the fire lookout tower was built near a , and was equipped with a ladder, lookout platform, and an (
ja). From these towers watchmen could observe the entire town, and in the event of a fire they would ring the alarm bell, calling up firemen and warning town residents. In some towns the bells were also used to mark the time. While the fire lookout towers remained fully equipped into the
Shōwa period, they were later replaced by telephone and radio broadcasting systems in many cities.
Canada Like the United States, fire towers were built across Canada to protect the valuable trees for the forestry industry. Most towers were built in the early 1920s to 1950s and were a mix of wood and steel structures. A total of 325 towers dotted the landscape of
Ontario in the 1960s, and today approx. 156 towers span the province, but only a handful of towers remained in use after the 1970s. They are still in use in
British Columbia,
Alberta,
Saskatchewan,
Manitoba, Ontario and a few of the
Maritime Provinces.
Nova Scotia decommissioned the last of its 32 fire towers in 2015 and had them torn down by a contractor.
Germany The first fire lookout tower was built to the plans of Forstmeister Walter Seitz between 1890 and 1900, located in the "Muskauer Forst" near
Weißwasser. Warnings were transmitted by light signal. For transmission of location, Seitz divided the forest area into so-called "Jagen", numbered areas, with that number to be transmitted to the city. He received a patent for this system in 1902. Seitz traveled to the 1904
Louisiana Purchase Exposition for a presentation of his idea in the USA.
Russia , c. 1900As wood had been a key building material in
Russia for centuries, urban fires were a constant threat to the towns and cities. To address that issue, in the early 19th century a program was launched to construct
fire stations equipped with lookout towers called
kalancha, overlooking mostly low-rise quarters. Watchmen standing vigil there could signal other stations as well as their own using simple signals. Surviving towers are often local landmarks. ==Today==