A pilot for your municipality

OrbiVigil watches for fire starts continuously from Earth-observation satellites and puts the result in front of municipal staff, in plain language and with its limits written down. The pilot is free, we pre-configure your territory, and one official email address is all it takes to request it.

OrbiVigil is a decision-support tool. Warning the public and committing resources remain exclusively with the fire and rescue services, prefectures and operational centres. We replace no official alerting chain, and we never write to your residents.

Canadian municipality, regional district or Indigenous community? Read the Canada-specific page.

What the municipality gets

Four concrete things, working on day one

No system to integrate, no software to install, no hardware. Everything runs in a browser, on desktop and on a phone.

On your territory

Your municipality, pre-configured

We create the watched area around the municipal centre before your first sign-in: there is nothing for you to set up.
The radius and name are yours to change, and several areas are possible — hamlets, business parks, campsites, wildland-urban interface.
The municipality is identified by its official code, never guessed from a similar-looking name.

The core of the pilot

During an event

Detection and email alerts

Continuous detection from satellite thermal sensors.
An email as soon as an event at level "probable" or above appears in one of your areas, with its distance, time and sources.
One event alerts once per area: the service will not flood the town hall inbox.

Day to day

The municipal dashboard

The live map, the day's meteorological fire danger, wind and national vigilance.
The industrial and high-risk site registry, so a permanent heat source is not read as a fire start.
History and replay of a past event — useful for a debrief or a case file.

Always

Provenance for every figure

Every event carries its sources, its timestamps and its data licence.
Observed and modelled values never render the same way.
When the satellite cannot see through cloud, the service says so instead of showing "no fire".

What we measure, and what we do not claim

Our published numbers, with their limits

A public body cannot act on an unverifiable promise. Here is the one speed measurement we publish, and exactly what it is worth.

Comparison against an official register

+1.08 h · median lead

Across 3,417 matches between our events and the official hotspots of Natural Resources Canada's CWFIS, our first detection precedes the official publication by 1.08 hours at the median, at a median match distance of 1.09 km.
The full record is published, losses included: 2,619 wins, 628 losses, 170 ties. We do not publish a chosen average.

Read this honestly. It is a comparison of publication latency between two pipelines drawing on largely the same satellites — not independent ground truth, and it does not say which pipeline is right. It was established over Canada, where a comparable open official register exists; we have no published equivalent for France and we will not manufacture one by analogy. What we are offering is precisely to measure this on your territory, during the pilot.

We measure and report where we are wrong: the lead-time scoreboard and spread-forecast accuracy, with under- and over-prediction reported separately.

Level 3 is human

The automatic chain stops at level 2, "probable". No automation declares a fire "confirmed" — only a named analyst can.
An alert you receive is therefore a detection to verify, not a finding.

What we cannot see

Thermal sensors detect heat: a young fire under dense canopy or under cloud may be seen late, or not at all.
Useful resolution is a few hundred metres: OrbiVigil will not spot a vehicle fire or a burning fly-tip.
Satellites pass overhead on their own schedule: observation frequency varies through the day.

The pilot

What it includes, what it costs, what happens at the end

Free, no commitment

€0 · trial period

No card, no purchase order, no procurement process to try it.
An account at the "Municipal government" role, signed in by a secure emailed link — no password to manage.
Several staff can be equipped; just tell us who.

At the end

Nothing is lost

If the pilot is not renewed, the account becomes a free account: email alerts stop, the live map stays available.
Nothing is deleted — the account, your watched areas and the history stay in place. Renewing reactivates them rather than rebuilding them.
You are told before the end date, and the days remaining are shown in the dashboard.

Your data

The minimum

We keep: the municipality name, a contact, an official email address, your watched areas.
We ask for no resident personal data and no access to your systems.

Request a pilot

One official email address is enough

We reply within two working days. Every request is reviewed by a person: this form creates no account and opens no access automatically.

What happens next: 1. we check the request really comes from the municipality; 2. we create the account at the municipal role and configure your territory; 3. you receive a welcome email with your activation link, the pilot duration and the name of your contact. Steps 1 and 2 take up to two working days.

Prefer to write? use the contact form. Representing a fire service, an intermunicipal body, a prefecture or an operations centre? The Pricing page describes the institutional offer.

Building a procurement file? The Trust & data practices page covers where data lives, what personal data is processed, and our sub-processors.