Ottawa residents impacted by Maui wildfires

As wildfires continue to burn in Hawaii, many Ottawa residents have had their upcoming travel plans upended.

Judy and Brian Cutler planned to celebrate their 30^th wedding anniversary on Maui in September. The vacation, which also included their family, was to include a vow renewal ceremony on the beach.

"It's just devastating," Judy Cutler said. "Those poor people, I can't even imagine what they're doing through over there."

She said they plan to donate to the Red Cross in support of relief efforts on the island while they sort out alternate arrangements for an important milestone.

"My husband's determined we're going somewhere and we're going to have a beach wedding, so we're looking at possibly Jamaica but it's not going to be quite the same," Cutler said.

The wildfires come as researchers from the University of Ottawa and University of Hawaii had been studying how artificial intelligence could be used to help combat wildfires. It includes inputting key information like satellite images, weather data and human activity into a computer system to interpret the data.

"By having all these parameters I can feed my AI model and automatically my AI model create a map," said University of Ottawa associate professor Hossein Bonakdari. "This map shows us the likelihood of the wildfire for each point of the study area."