Drones in the Forest: How Do Wildland Firefighters, Pilots, and Dispatch Feel About Them?
We found out... that size matters.
About a decade ago, we were called to a wildfire in the middle of the night to a godforsaken place in the middle of the desert called Dugway. If you don’t know, Dugway Proving Ground is a U.S. Army facility in the middle of Utah, about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and is used to test biological and chemical weapons.
When we arrived, both nervousness and excitement filled the back of the buggies. Everyone knew we were walking into a rodeo. Besides the unexploded ordnance littering the ground around us, it was actually a fairly standard desert fire. The first shift was a rammer. We established an anchor and leap-frogged squads until each saw team threw their chains at least five times. Juniper in Dugway tugs differently…
We bedded down next to the trucks and tried to “sleep” while wind storms blew sand and dust all over us. Not as bad as the time in Arizona when stop signs were blowing by sleeping bags, and spike camp was set up in a turtle sanctuary. Buggies bottoming out in breading burrows in an early morning hasty evacuation because the Biologists were coming… That’s another story in itself.
After a few hours of tossing and turning while questioning life decisions, we woke up at 05:00 to go cold trail a nearly dead piece of ground. The dusty group of savages brushed the remains of chemical and biological testing grounds off their beards and braids while eating cold oatmeal as fast as possible. The unlucky ones were spooning gelatinous beef stew MRE into their parched mouths while allowing the occasional obscenity to leak out.
Classic.
On our last shift there, it was your typical hide-a-hotshot day. If you’re unaware of what this is, you seek shade in the scraggliest areas underneath the only juniper tree for hundreds of yards in each direction, or you find the deepest darkest hole below your swamp piles. You auger in, and everyone talks about how it strangely resembles the heart and soul of the 5th-year Lead firefighter. This is the average operation on a monitor day.
We received radio traffic earlier in the morning saying that air operations would be shut down because they would be testing drones in the area. It was the first time any of us had seen a drone over a wildfire. We joked that they were targeting us like the Taliban and using us for mock target practice. Which they probably were.
This did, however, start a larger conversation about drones on wildfires. It’s evident now that we are diving headlong into launching this technology throughout the field. I think it’s essential to find out how the community feels on many different levels on this subject.
I put out three different polls covering different drone operations. There were over 2,000 respondents in what was one of the most popular polls to date. I got tremendous feedback from Hotshots, engine folks, helitack, pilots, and dispatch.
I will cover the results of each poll and discuss the numerous responses from folks in the industry. Most notable was the pilots’ responses. Many people are for the technologies, but there seem to be some ground-to-air communication barriers and perhaps a sense of underutilization of the current platforms available. This is most likely cultural… “is this flight necessary?”
Two things that became abundantly clear are that the overwhelming majority welcome drones. Especially the smaller quadcopter platforms. But the overwhelming majority don’t want to work in or underneath pilotless systems. A fascinating result.
Let’s get into it.
Should small quadcopter drones for recon and infrared missions be easily available to order and utilize on wildfires by Ops and Divisions?
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