photo credit: Harika Maddala, Catchlight Local)
Cal Fire and some Bay Area fire departments are increasingly utilizing unmanned aerial resources that use artificial intelligence, hazardous materials capabilities, thermal imaging and digital mapping tools to help respond to a variety of emergencies.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said in June during a stop at Cal Fire’s Grass Valley Air Attack Base, about 65 miles northeast of Sacramento, that Cal Fire had been bulking up its technology by modifying existing aerial resources and investing in new types of drones.
“In just five years, California’s wildfire response has seen a tech revolution. We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires, exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter,” Newsom said.
Drones powered by artificial intelligence can help predict wildfires and detect them early, analyze data, predict movement and progress, and relay information in real time to firefighters on the ground, according to Cal Fire.
Meanwhile, the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District is expanding its drone program to include a type that can fly in more extreme conditions, including hazmat situations that require safety features to prevent igniting flammable gases.
That marks the fifth type of drone the fire district will utilize, including training drones, in a growing effort to make drones a regular firefighting tool.
Assistant Fire Chief Chris Bachman with the Contra Costa County district has been expanding the program since 2019. He said the drones have provided a critical tool for firefighters, such as in Antioch in June, when a fire at a vacant warehouse required attacks from multiple hoses.
“The thermal imaging piece was very helpful as we had three, sometimes four aerial streams,” Bachman said.
He said there was between 850-1,100 gallons of water flowing into the building every minute for about three hours, which obscured the view of the interior fire.
The new device is a Matrice 30 Enterprise drone made by DJI. It is equipped with a thermal imaging camera, zoom camera and has weight capacity to mount other add-ons. At a cost of $25,000, the drone represents a major advancement of the district’s drone program, according to Bachman. Its hazmat-safe capabilities allow it to fly in situations in which a small spark could ignite flammable gases, as well as heavy wind and rain.
Bachman said the district could have utilized the drone during a search-and-rescue operation when a series of winter rainstorms moved through the region, when high winds tested the existing drones’ limits.
“We would put a drone in the air, and we really lucked out that it wasn’t pouring down rain, because that drone was able to provide us good information about the current rescue situation that we were we were dealing with and great intel. But moving forward, it’s going to be nice to know that we have a platform now, that, even if it is raining, we can still put it near not have to worry about that drone coming down,” Bachman said.
The Contra Costa County program started with six firefighters being trained on smaller drones and has grown to about 18 pilots currently in the drone program.
The San Francisco Fire Department and Sonoma Valley Fire District have also created dedicated drone units that can be utilized in cliff and surf rescues, hazmat incidents, incident mapping and other uses.
Wonder if it’s called sky net. The first drone model name is T1000
Technology can new and shiny but quickly becomes obsolete and impossible or expensive to maintain. Something I find interesting is that for about 2.5 million years we made and used a single type of tool, the Oldowan chopper. About 50,000 years ago we started making and using other types of tools. Progress seemed slow until very recent times. My mother in law’s family in Nebraska lived, what we call today “off the grid,” but it was not by choice as there was no grid in Nebraska in those days. They raised and grew their own food supplemented by hunting and trapping. Electricity and telephones did not arrive in their part of Nebraska until my mother in law was a teenager. She saw her first airplane about the first time, a stunning event for people in the area, and lived to see people land on the Moon and live on the International Space Station. I have been wondering if the new and shiny growth curve will flatten out. Computers hit the speed of light around the year 2000 and have not improved since then other than packing more of them on a chip.
What they need now is a drone that will find arsonists. I would rather they buy a fleet of 747 tankers.
Coming from a drone pilot, they do NOT use AI technology. Maybe a ground station can use AI to look at the video feed, but the drone itself doesn’t have ability for AI. It’s computer is like from a cell phone from the 90s.
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Any drone over my property will be taken out by a blast from a Remington 870.
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Period.
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Might want to be careful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABhmcuy7gFg