A future in which drones fly over burning buildings, find lost hikers, rescue struggling swimmers, deliver lifesaving medicine, and make firefighters obsolete has turned into the present. Kind of. OK, firefighters aren’t relics of the past. However, the utilization of drones makes us better at responding to the needs of the public and allows us to remain flexible enough to help all kinds of other agencies in areas of service that we never worked before.
Since the Seaside, CA, Fire Department (SFD) started responding to calls with drones in 2015, the reality of responding has turned out to be challenging and exciting. The work that department put in resulted in hard-fought gains in a field that didn’t exist a decade ago. Those who are willing to jump into the drone world stand to gain valuable tools and to aid their department, but the path might lead to some interesting places.
Undervalued or overhyped?
Reports of drones that are equipped with hoses to fight high-rise fires and that carry AEDs to patients hasn’t helped to keep expectations realistic for what the fire service can—let alone, should—do with a drone. Drones are no silver bullet. A drone by itself with even the most skilled crew can accomplish basically nothing. The idea that our work as firefighters will be changed dramatically by a drone flying overhead is false.
Now, the good news: With proper implementation, drones make a variety of activities that are dangerous to us substantially safer. The “great unknown” that seems to haunt hazardous calls, such as hazmat incidents, search and rescue calls and all manner of water-rescue calls, can be addressed via livestreamed video that’s sent back to the incident command post. Real-time decisions can be made based on an interactive video instead of based on a radio transmission. The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” becomes even more relevant when an incident commander has an unmanned flying video camera to base important decisions on. On top of the utility and safety that a drone brings to the incident scene, the technology is simple, rugged, compact and inexpensive.
Our baptism by … fire?
The SFD’s original drone was a used search and rescue drone that the department bought for structure fires. The drone was customized by hand and had plenty of bells and whistles: two cameras, larger motors and a controller that had two monitors, for watching both cameras. It was the absolute best possible drone for flying on fire scenes. It cost the department about $10,000 and was the only drone around that was licensed and certified and had a large team of pilots to fly it day or night. The SFD planned on flying it at all sorts of fires to help operations, and it was ready for dispatch. The only problem was that it never was needed for a structure fire, not even once.
The department’s first call was for a driver who fled the scene of a rollover vehicle accident in the middle of the night. The drone got to the scene and could have found the suspect, but the team had too many hurdles to clear and too many moving parts to get together before the drone could fly. The drone team did everything that it was supposed to do. Every piece of equipment did its job, but by the time that the drone was airborne, it was too late: The suspect was long gone.
Even though it wasn’t a success, word got around. The department started getting calls from all over regarding its drone, and they weren’t fire calls. Calls came regarding someone armed and dangerous in a brush field. There were several responses for swimmers who went missing. The bomb squad called for a backpack that might be a bomb. A hiker got lost, and the local fire department called for help to find the individual at night. Calls came from all over the SFD’s response area of 430,000 people, but not one for a structure fire.
The department found itself reliving its calls in training scenarios, because countless areas for improvement were recognized. The SFD’s calls weren’t what pilots trained for, because the department never anticipated who would call. The SFD thought it would fly circles high above burning buildings: The department’s response area has mostly single-story houses that are clearly visible from across the street; drones weren’t need at structure fires.
Curbing expectations
A drone team alone can’t do much. It is at its best as part of a larger team and must be used appropriately for any chance of a good outcome.
Most drones are built to take beautiful, cinematic-quality videos, to fly miles away, to follow autonomous flight routes. The SFD turns down the video resolution on its drone cameras; drones are flown slowly and are kept close to the landing area. Drones are brought back long before battery life would be tested.
In short, flying drones on scene is boring. Excitement doesn’t factor into the equation. The SFD’s goal is to mitigate a problem by helping others do their job more efficiently and safely.
Maximizing effectiveness
Working with specialty teams, such as hazmat teams, USAR, SWAT and bomb squads, can be the most effective use of the drone team. The SFD drone team easily goes into scenarios that otherwise would involve someone getting in a suit or going into a hazardous scenario just to gather info. Although a drone can’t do anything by itself, it can give details to people who are going into harm’s way, provide video of the operation and capture the incident on video for a debrief later.
Want a look at a backpack before the bomb squad suits up? Want to search rooms via a third-story window in a compromised building? Want to look in a window for the guy who barricaded himself from the police? Not a problem. Any drone and any drone operator who is properly trained and equipped can do that.
The most used piece of equipment that the SFD drone team has is by far the thermal imaging camera (TIC). Just as the TIC revolutionized fireground operations, it completely changed the game for drones. Finding people in the middle of nowhere at night went from nearly impossible to easy as pie. The TIC works better at night than a normal camera does during the day for finding people. A person’s heat signature is visible from hundreds of yards away under the right conditions. The SFD found that it even could follow where a vehicle drove through the grass, because the heat from the soil was easier to see when the grass was driven over. The department’s most successful calls have been at night looking for people in thick brush and trees.
Finding someone using a TIC sounds easy, but it’s a skill that takes time to learn. For training new pilots, the SFD uses a big-screen TV rather than the tablet that’s used on scene. Even with the advantage of a large, high-resolution image, new pilots have trouble identifying people in the video until there is a “Eureka moment,” and it all starts to make sense to them.
An experienced pilot won’t spend long looking at a heat signature before determining what it is and making a decision. Although a human’s heat signature is visible from far away, it can be impossible to differentiate it from hundreds of other objects in the area: wildlife, livestock, pets, machinery and other inanimate objects. (On several occasions, the SFD team flew over a target for a long time just to have an officer scare a wild animal in the dark in the thickest patch of poison oak that it could find.)
Although learning while on scene is important, the need for training in these scenarios greatly reduces the chance of failure on scene. Experience isn’t something pilots can learn without trips away from the station to practice at old buildings, in wildland areas, on open water, etc. The time that it takes for pilots to build the skills that they need usually is about 50 hours of flight time with a particular drone.
When a drone won’t fly
All drone pilots have been there. They get to a scene where they truly are needed, and the drone refuses to fly. The batteries are fine, the monitors are fine, all of the cables are connected, but there is something that keeps the drone from flying. Are we in a new airspace (the distance from an airport, sports venue or some other sensitive location that is off-limits)? Did the firmware update? Is the monitor choosing right now to download an update? Is the Wi-Fi out? Are we working too close to something that is emitting magnetic or radio interference? Is it too cold or too hot?
Even the most prepared teams face issues that will stop the process before anything happens. Having complete redundancy that’s built into the team fixes these problems immediately. If one drone won’t fly because it’s having an issue, having a second drone on hand and a second set of hands to get it flying results in a mission success most of the time. Having several of everything is the best decision the SFD’s team ever made. The department operates three drones, four monitors and two hot spots.
Cost
Talking with colleagues at other departments who plan on starting a program, the same question comes up. How expensive are drones, and what features are important?
The SFD probably overbought with its first drone. With custom work, it cost the department about $10,000. Nevertheless, it didn’t fly very far, had terrible reception (even hovering directly above) and required frequent, costly repairs. To be fair, though, there weren’t a lot of options at the time.
The department’s second drone was spot on. An older drone (about $5,000) that had a stock (but nice) camera, the best thing about it was that it was durable. Teaching people to fly from the ground up is tough on drones. Hard landings, botched takeoffs and rough handling take a toll.
The cost of the department’s third and fourth drones was $1,300 each. They are quick to set up, easy to fly and reliable and have more features than are needed. The relatively low cost includes chargers and extra batteries.
The SFD’s large drone that caries the TIC has a port that accommodates different cameras. (A 4K video camera and a TIC are used interchangeably.) The TIC makes the drone indispensable, but the drone takes an experienced team about twice as long to set it up than the department’s other drones. It also is noisy, powerful and expensive enough that it isn’t flown unless absolutely necessary. The drone cost about $2,000; the total package (camera, TIC, extra batteries, chargers) came to nearly $10,000.
The bottom line
The features that make a drone useful usually are versatility, simplicity, speed of assembly and durability. A drone that only can fly one mission won’t be used much. A drone that’s complicated to use will be challenging to operate at 2:00 a.m. A drone that takes 30 minutes to assemble will result in the emergency resolving itself before the drone gets in the air. A fragile drone is good for a single crash—and it’s going to crash.
The purchase of a purpose-specific drone limits its capability and increases the chance that it won’t be used. Simply buying the wrong drone can lead a program down a path that limits the drone’s use and results in a feeling that it’s a useless piece of expensive equipment. A package that sets up quickly and is reliable and versatile gives pilots countless more opportunities to achieve what they set out to do.
The drones that work best for the SFD team are consumer drones that have no modifications that, in most cases, the department bought at a big-box store. The parts are easy to come by, online forums provide valuable insight, and there are enough of the exact same drones flying that we can learn from other people who fly them.
Learning from mistakes is what the fire service does as a profession. Although drones are a new frontier for some of us, they are an inevitable future for the rest. They can seem like an insurmountable obstacle for the uninitiated and can test the skills of even the most tech-savvy firefighter. However, consumer drones have become easy to use, inexpensive and incredibly useful for all kinds of calls—just not structure fires.
