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FEMA Grounds Private Drones That Were Helping To Map Boulder Floods
First time accepted submitter MrMagooAZ writes "An interesting article about a questionable reaction by FEMA in response to the flooding in Colorado. It seems a small firm was working free of charge with County officials to use drones to map the area and provide near-real-time maps of the flood damage. When FEMA took control of operations one of their first acts appears to have been to not only ground the drones, but threaten the operators. 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help you?'"
The drone model in question has permits from the FAA to be flown around even. The drones were replaced with manned craft that, due to the terrain, where unable to fly low enough to make useful maps.
.. as is individual efforts and coming together in crisis..Technology *is* powerful so of course individuals can't use it, no matter if it is a time of community crisis or not.
Can we stop referring to anything that is remotely controlled as a drone?
It was Colorado. Wasn't there a town that was talking about selling drone hunting licenses. The last thing they need are people shooting into the air.
Yes, your little, puny drones are no match for our US Defense Contractor drones that have a staff of thousands and bases all over the world. Trust us, we're much more capable of doing this job once we get the emergency congressional appropriations bill through and sign a new contract with the firm to load the special cameras we should be able to start mapping in about two years. By then we'll have this situation well in hand.
"Every Nation gets the government it deserves" - Joseph de Maistre
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Speculation on my part...
There are a large number of military helicopters operating in the area carrying relief supplies and evacuating people and all sorts of other activities. They can get on the radio and tell other (human) traffic in the area to get out of the way. I'm betting this drone can't respond to such verbal requests.
So if I was FEMA and I was tasked with coordinating all of these helicopter flights I might also say no to any drones I wasn't positive wouldn't be accidentally running into a helicopter full of evacuees.
I'm curious if there is a current NOTAM requiring special clearance to fly, or to obey extra rules in the area (like a specific radio frequency). If there is and the drone isn't following them, it is in violation.
If it is not in the written procedure STOP IT NOW!!!!
Seriously. They have a procedure they have to go through and follow to the letter. There is no room for innovation or individual thinking when it comes to Federal agencies. You deviate from written procedure you get written up or lose your job.
I have run into it enough times in action to know this was probably the case.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
Actually, they did pretty well during the Mississippi River flooding in 1993.
they either fly in pairs or cannot fly in odd angles ;)
Tomorrow is another day...
Success is not very news worthy. FEMA does pretty well on any number of smaller disasters, but more things go wrong in big disasters and just like the CDC, FEMA has become associated with 'bad things' and thus people tend to focus on the negative.
Add to that how much 'free' help can cost, it really is not as much help as the company makes it out to be. Even if those drones do a lovely job of avoiding other aircraft and taking pictures, that information still needs to be tied into their C&C, which means they have to dedicate people to coordinating with the private entity and merging the two data sets. Combine that with being unable to actually direct or coordinate with the private individuals and those good samaritans can really get in the way.
If they really want to help, I am sure there are relief efforts all over the region that could use some extra manpower.
"FEMA does pretty well on any number of smaller disasters, but more things go wrong in big disasters..."
But see, that's the whole point. Their REASON FOR EXISTENCE is basically big disasters. If they can't do that well (and arguably, they have demonstrated that they can't), they should be disbanded and the money redistributed to the states, which would at least do no worse.
The reality here is someone with some authority was an idiot. This is getting spun as "evil fema shut down the little nice drone maker" which clearly isn't accurate at all. It wasn't FEMA that did this, it was a guy who works at FEMA. I very much doubt the W. Craig Fugate ordered this, nor any of his staff. It was some idiot that works there without the knowledge of his superiors (although I bet they know now...). Also, he didn't just shut down the drone guy, this guy at FEMA is also clearly stepping on the toes of all the local authorities already on the scene.
I'm not saying the correct response here isn't to make it into a story, or to be upset about how this was handled. But the anger shouldn't be directed against the agency, it should be directed against the individual who made this call. I know big governmental agencies are faceless organizations, but it is nothing but a collection of people, and it's actions are those of the people it employees. If you want change, then demand change of the people and you'll get change of an organization.
Hurricane Sandy. Even Governor Christie (GOP) complemented the Obama administration on its response. Which incurred a political cost. So I don't think he made his comments lightly.
Have gnu, will travel.
You'll note that they seem to do the poorest job in areas where people were told to evacuate, but didn't for whatever reason. I think there might be a connection.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The funny thing about disasters is that they are disastrous.
Know what else is disastrous? Public outcry from people who have no idea what it might take to respond to a large scale disaster.
No one REALLY wants to pay for emergency preparation. How many people do you know who have no appreciable food / water / emergency supplies, emergency plans in place, and conduct any kind of training or rehersals with their families? Most people have no real will to prepare themselves, and that mentality shows in government funding choices.
So few people pay any kind of mind to preparing themselves for emergencies, it gets tiresom hearing people bitch about the government not being as ready as their extensive movie-watching has led them to believe is reasonable.
THL phish sticks
And what happens if those people really were more capable of helping than the government which is threatening arrest? After all, trying to rescue someone is not quite the same as actually rescuing someone.
A little bit of context. Rescue operations were then ongoing, in fact what is now deemed the largest aerial rescue operation since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. More than 700 people were evacuated by air.
The rescue operations also included the town of Lyons, Colorado which is the same location where the UAVs were operating.
It is not inconceivable given the scale of the rescue operations that the UAVs were impeding the helicopters. And to use your analogy, the helicopters were actively 'rescuing someone' compared to UAVs which were... mapping. You can draw your own conclusions which is more important.
Federal resources are appreciated in an emergency. They save lives. Federal bullying is not appreciated in an emergency. It can jeopardize lives. There are examples of them doing it right, and of them doing it wrong. This UAV incident seems to be the latter.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You'll note that they seem to do the poorest job in areas where people were told to evacuate, but didn't for whatever reason. I think there might be a connection.
I think there is a bigger connection between "FEMA not taking over an incident" and "Governor of state refusing to ask for aide from FEMA when it would have done the most good." You know, like three days before Katrina made landfall and everything could have been staged while the roads were still passable and stuff, instead of several days after and the police of a major city involved fled in panic.
Now, the company who is trying to make themselves look good has claimed that CAP didn't carry cameras or video. Yes, CAP has an entire ES qualification dealing with aerial photography (i.e., they were almost certainly carrying cameras) but are hindered in real time video by managing a data link of sufficient bandwidth. The FCC rules prohibit use of cell phones (and data) while airborne, so it's not just a case of slapping a cell data card in a laptop and firing off the data. That's not to say that GIIEP should be as stupidly complex as it is, however. Forcing all data through one military system with associated military level authentication and sucky bandwidth is a mistake, but the approved cell data cards are not generally available as far as I know.
Small disasters are handled by mid level management who are somewhat competent. The big disasters they call in the high level bureaucrats to handle it and those are the truly incompetent ones. Actually they are really just politicians and good at kissing ass and things like that but not good at handling disasters.
Phil's Hobby Shop appears to get away with calling them radio control airplanes and helicopters.
I've tried to read through this thread, and 2 things impress the hell out of me.
1. The number of posts which are nothing more than duplicates, more than 10 of each scattered through the thread, stop it slashdot!
2. The number of folks who are apologists for FEMA's past performances. This is the same runaway agency that has freshly constructed around 200 so called 'camps' which can contain, behind tall human proof fences, several thousand people per 'camp'.
This is the same runaway agency that authorized LE to shoot to kill, anyone in N.O. who armed themselves against the looters, people who were doing the only thing they knew how to do to survive when there was little food and NO potable water. With no help from FEMA other than confiscating weapons, they interfered with the survival of some of those who had the foresight to prepare themselves and survive, while dooming to a neglected or drowning death, a considerable number of folks in the many hospitals and care homes. They blocked the roads leaving, preventing the many who had their own transportation from getting the hell of of Dodge. That damned sure doesn't fit this old farts definition of a relief agency, but it sure reminds me of Hitler's Gestapo, rounding up the Jews.
This is the same agency that left nearly 100k folks locked in the superdome with no food, water, or sanitation. For several days .
If anything, Katrina taught me that FEMA , under the ultimate direction of Bush 2, has well exceeded the level of uselessness usually attributed to the teats on a board hog.
It is decade's past time to cut our loses with FEMA, it has turned into an agency with a black budget that will never be audited, and whose sole directive is to survive by sucking the public money trough dry. Other than helping to arrange overpriced loans after Sandy, they have done so little to earn their keep that any corporations board of directors would have pulled the plug on them 20 or more years back.
However, I do think we need an agency to give instant aid in situations such as Katrina, Sandy, and now this unprecedented 500 year flooding. But FEMA is not that agency when they refuse to make use of today's technology. As presently operated, it isn't capable of doing useful work when needed. Stop the bleeding. If done quickly enough, the patient, us, might even survive.
Yes, I fly them, and work with the engineers who design them. These things, and more specifically, the people who advocate for them, are a menace. They have no semblance of airworthiness, are not designed to be safe in the airspace, and are generally (the small ones) flown by people who have neither the training nor the operating procedures to safely fly them. There's a reason the global hawk costs $200M and the reaper $60M. That because more than a million engineering hours has been put into each to make them airworthy. The small remote control toys have no redundancy of design in structure, programming, hardware architecture, propulsion or datalinks, and generally flown by people who have no concept of how many people they can hurt by launching them up at people who are properly using the airspace.
When the weather's bad, aviation doesn't stop, you just don't see it. Pilots fly in the clouds every day, throughout the world. No UAV has a safety system that will allow it to safely fly near other aircraft, much less ones that the operator can't see. Do you just casually assume that nobody was flying that day with SWIR or SAR imagers Both of those will punch through the clouds and can be safely flown. Would be a damn shame to kill them. Geography of that area, in particular, limits IFR flight of helicopters, but in many large area disasters, helicopters are flying in and out of the clouds on IFR flight plans. Would be really bad to take out a life flight helicopter because your little quadcopter doesn't have robust communications links.
It's no longer, " 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help you", which was laughable even amongst its supporters.
Now it's the slightly more terrifying 'I'm from the government* and I am the ONLY one who is allowed help you".
An idea which they enforce with far more efficiency. After all, an independent, self-sufficient populace might get ideas otherwise. Why, they might even come up with the notion that the government is beholden to its people rather than the other way around!
I suppose the idea of working with these guys never occurred to FEMA? It sounds like they were providing useful data.
* (or one of its overpaid contractors)
Unless there are regulations about federal agencies using drones/UAVs on the American public.
There are.
You can't legally fly a unmanned aircraft remotely OR autonomously without visual contact from the ground by the person responsible for the aircraft. A camera in the aircraft does not count. The 'responsible person' can't change while its in the air. It is against federal aviation regulations.
These guys apparently had a waiver from the FAA to do it however, which is good to know because I want such waiver for my own uses and was under the impression that the FAA was not yet granting any waivers for this purpose to civilians. Its something they've been trying to figure out how to deal with for a couple years now, and its a non-trivial problem.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Especially when most news outlets are owned by media moguls with a vested interest in making the government look bad, so they get leverage to deregulate and thus transfer more of its power to themselves.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.