Could tech replace firefighters in the battle against wildfires?

France's Gironde region has been hit by devastating wildfires this summer

The pictures are familiar, terrifying fires being tackled by firefighters and planes dropping water.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes across France, Spain and Portugal as wildfires tore through forests and countryside.

In France, four men have already lost their lives fighting the wildfires and another 150 have been injured.

But why are humans and 30-year old planes being used? Why can drones replace soldiers in Ukraine but not firefighters?

Chief sergeant Guillaume Millet, a firefighter of 24 years experience heads the Fire and Rescue Service branch of the CFDT union in the Gironde, the region worst hit by wildfires in France this summer.

He says that while the techniques for tackling fire have not changed much, technology in forest fire detection has.

"The big change, especially in my département, is that now we've got cameras assisted by artificial intelligence to watch the forest and see where fires are starting," Millet says.

"In the Gironde, cameras have replaced the human look-outs we had in watch towers in every town throughout the summer months," he says. Those lookouts were often students.

The switch has reduced false alarms, he says. "An AI-assisted camera can distinguish with almost total certainty between smoke and dust thrown up by a tractor in a field, for example."

They have an impressive range as well, detecting fires up to 20km (12 miles) away.

Catching fires early is essential - once established they are harder to manage

In the Gironde, the system was installed by a company called Midgard. In other parts of France, it's another French start-up called FireTracking.

"As soon as the system detects a fire, there's an alert on the fire fighters' telephones. They open the application and see what the camera is seeing with a x40 [40 times] zoom," explains FireTracking's CEO Jean-Simon Chaudier.

"Next to that real-time video there's a map with the exact location of the fire, the position of any nearby houses and a simulation of how, given the weather, the level of humidity and so on, it is expected to spread from minute to minute," he adds.