Drones that help and drones that delay
Wildfire season shows good and bad sides of unmanned aerial vehicles
As a wildfire raged near Testalinden Creek in southern British Columbia last month, threatening award-winning Okanagan vineyards, the B.C. Wildfire Service put some muscle into the fight, launching eight helicopters and five aircraft to support fire crews on the ground.
Everything was going as well as could be expected in the midst of an out-of-control forest fire when suddenly a drone appeared. No one knew where it had come from or who was piloting it, but there was only one solution — ground all firefighting aircraft until it was gone.
“That incident had a significant impact on our firefighting suppression efforts that day,” said Noelle Kekula, a fire information officer for the B.C. Wildfire Service. “I have no idea why someone would do that.”
It wasn’t the first time it had happened — or even the first time this summer. In early August, a helicopter supporting ground crews at a wildfire west of Kelowna was forced to land after multiple drones were spotted in the area.
This prompted the B.C. Wildfire Service to issue a press release pointing out that Transport Canada explicitly prohibits the use of drones near a wildfire because they can pose a “significant safety risk to personnel.”
If caught — a task that’s easier said than done — violators can face fines of up to $5,000 and up to six months in jail.
But while unknown drone operators were endangering helicopter crews and hampering firefighting efforts in B.C., a subsidiary of Boeing Co. was proving that drones can also be a force for good in the fight against wildfires.
Last month, a ScanEagle drone made by Insitu Inc. spent a week at the Paradise fire in Washington’s Olympic National Park. It used an infrared camera to identify hot spots and pinpoint the exact size and location of the fire, assisting manned aircraft when the smoke got too thick to see properly and at night, when they’re not permitted to fly.
Although the U.S. government has occasionally used drones in the fight against forest fires, this was the first time a private company supplied an unmanned aircraft to assist fire crews, said Charlton Evans, program manager for commercial and civil unmanned aircraft systems at Insitu.
“This is definitely a historic, watershed event,” Evans said in an interview. “We’ve finally come to a point where the (government) agencies are seriously entertaining integrating manned systems with unmanned systems.”
He said the goal is to be able to provide fire crews with real-time data on fire size, growth, behaviour, fuels and hot spots.
“For better or worse, the fires seem to be growing in scope every year, and the causes of that are left to debate but the reality is that we keep spending more and more of our time and resources on fighting fires,” Evans said.
“This technology is certainly going to make a huge difference in how effectively we fight fires.”
While unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are used by many Canadian fire departments to fight burning buildings, a seasoned drone expert said he doesn’t know of any cases where they’ve been used in forest fires in this country.
However, Canada is considered a leader in the world of drone testing so it’s probably only a matter of time, said Sterling Cripps, founder and president of UAV training company Canadian Unmanned Inc.
“There are a lot of companies looking at what Canada is doing,” Cripps said. “Just by virtue of our geography, we’re a highly soughtafter market for using UAVs.”
He added that many of Canada’s biggest industries — energy, mining, forestry, transportation and agriculture — are prime testing grounds for drones.
The widespread use of drones for recreational and commercial purposes is a recent phenomenon that’s being driven by improving technology and falling costs, and regulators are scrambling to keep up.
In May, Transport Canada announced that it would hold consultations on developing a new regulatory regime for UAVs, proposing “new flight rules, aircraft marking and registration requirements, knowledge testing, minimum age limits, and pilot permits for certain UAV operators.”
And the B.C. government said last week that it plans to introduce tougher laws prohibiting the use of drones around wildfires.
Currently, recreational users of drones that weigh less than 35 kilograms don’t need permission to fly but are prohibited from flying near airports, people, animals, buildings or vehicles, including sporting events, concerts, busy streets and anywhere they may interfere with first responders.
Commercial operators of UAVs that weigh over 25 kilograms require a special flight operations certificate from Transport Canada and must follow similar rules to recreational users.