K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
Drones are becoming increasingly useful tools in public safety. They’re used by firefighters to coordinate missions and put out hotspots, they help with search and rescue after floods and earthquakes, and they track animal migration.
Sounds great, right? But there’s a problem. Millions of these drones are made in China, and the U.S. government sees them as national security risks. And that’s pitting the alleged threat of snooping drones against very real public safety risks.
Using drones to fight wildfires
Early on a Monday morning at a Los Angeles City Fire Department training center, fire department employees examined a collection of drones.
“Every drone is like a different tool, and there’s not one tool for every given operation,” said Stephen Hamilton, an inspector with the fire department. He pointed to the Mavic 2, made by the Chinese company DJI. “These are kind of the workhorse of the department.”
The trainees have jobs ranging from search and rescue to emergency response. Los Angeles was an early adopter of drones. Fire Department Assistant Chief Richard Fields started working with DJI in 2015 on a pilot project to custom-build drones for urban public safety. He says there was some skepticism at first about the use of drones. But that changed in 2017 after a brush fire in the affluent neighborhood of Bel Air. Firefighters used drones to detect hotspots.
“It reduced the number of firefighters you had to work, or to what we call ‘grid,’ an area. It sped up the time that we were able to get all the hotspots and make sure that the fire was completely out. The benefit to the public is that we were now able to lift evacuation orders much quicker,” Fields says.
Continue reading: https://wdet.org/2022/05/18/tracked-and-traced-how-a-ban-on-chinese-drones-could-set-back-wildfire-fighting-in-the-u-s/
Sounds great, right? But there’s a problem. Millions of these drones are made in China, and the U.S. government sees them as national security risks. And that’s pitting the alleged threat of snooping drones against very real public safety risks.
Using drones to fight wildfires
Early on a Monday morning at a Los Angeles City Fire Department training center, fire department employees examined a collection of drones.
“Every drone is like a different tool, and there’s not one tool for every given operation,” said Stephen Hamilton, an inspector with the fire department. He pointed to the Mavic 2, made by the Chinese company DJI. “These are kind of the workhorse of the department.”
The trainees have jobs ranging from search and rescue to emergency response. Los Angeles was an early adopter of drones. Fire Department Assistant Chief Richard Fields started working with DJI in 2015 on a pilot project to custom-build drones for urban public safety. He says there was some skepticism at first about the use of drones. But that changed in 2017 after a brush fire in the affluent neighborhood of Bel Air. Firefighters used drones to detect hotspots.
“It reduced the number of firefighters you had to work, or to what we call ‘grid,’ an area. It sped up the time that we were able to get all the hotspots and make sure that the fire was completely out. The benefit to the public is that we were now able to lift evacuation orders much quicker,” Fields says.
Continue reading: https://wdet.org/2022/05/18/tracked-and-traced-how-a-ban-on-chinese-drones-could-set-back-wildfire-fighting-in-the-u-s/
