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Drones Hamper Californian Firefighting Efforts
The quest for YouTube virality is putting human lives in danger
Earlier I bitched about self-entitled folks taking photographs to the potential detriment of others. But this is way, way worse.
On Friday a wildfire broke out in California. Unfortunately for a group of motorists stuck in traffic, the fire happened to intersect with the 15 freeway:
— FOX 11 Los Angeles (@myfoxla) July 17, 2015 " contenteditable="false"> Enter a caption (optional)Once it hit the freeway, the blaze actually set an estimated 20-30 cars aflame:
When traffic is jammed bumper-to-bumper and the fire trucks have a hard time reaching the site, there's a firefighting protocol: You send helicopters and airplanes to dump water onto the conflagration. However, in this case no less than five a**holes decided to deploy their camera-equipped drones over the scene to record it, presumably in the hopes of posting a viral YouTube video. There's another protocol, this one aviation-based, dictating that when drones are in the area, you cannot deploy aircraft, for safety's sake. NBC quoted the U.S. Forest Service's John Miller to explain why:
It can kill our firefighters in the air ... They can strike one of these things and one of our aircraft could go down, killing the firefighters in the air. This is serious to us. It is a serious, not only life threat, not only to our firefighters in the air, but when we look at the vehicles that were overrun by fire, it was definitely a life-safety threat to the motorists on Interstate 15.
Luckily no one died—people wisely got out of their cars and fled as they spotted the wildfire approaching—but CNN puts a finer point on the hazard the drones posed:
The 15 to 20 minutes that those helicopters were grounded meant that 15 to 20 minutes were lost that could have led to another water drop cycle, and that would have created a much safer environment and we would not have seen as many citizens running for their lives.
This sounds like a job for Johnny Dronehunter.
Via Gizmodo
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Comments
Wonder how they manage to fly with all those birds in the air? The birds that pose a threat to aviation are generally mush larger than drones. I bet there were news helicopters that took the "risk". Those same news copters probably pose a much bigger threat. but drones are new, be afraid, wait till government tells you they safe and has common sense regulation to make sure everyone is safe. Never let a serious crisis go to waste, use it to increase government power.
The problems isn't that drones are new. In-fact the "drones" this article is referring to have been around for at least a few decades now. They were just never called "drones" and they were flown by smart people who took it as a serious hobby.
For the most parts birds fly away from planes and helicopters; drones do not fly away because they do not fear them. And birds have caused great damage and death to planes and helicopters for almost a century. No need for government bashing here.
sounds like a bad government policy.... i agree with river... the engineer side of me has a hard time believing that a small quadcopter could do much damage to a firefighting copter... and even then, it would have to get directly above, and sucked into the blades for anything to even have the chance of happening.