This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
About one in four people in the United States lives in an area served by cellular phone towers at risk of an outage caused by wildfires, according to a recent study by Paul Barford, a UW-Madison professor of computer sciences, and Carol Barford, who directs UW–Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. More than 430,000 cell network transceivers covering approximately 85 million people are in areas the U.S. Forest Service considers at moderate or high wildfire risk, the researchers found. Their study suggests ways to make the sites more fire-hardy.
Read the full article at: https://ls.wisc.edu/news/protecting-infrastructure