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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.
Can we stop referring to anything that is remotely controlled as a drone?
Bah, hate replying to my own comment, there is a NOTAM: http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4481.html
"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM (except as described)."
Reason for NOTAM : TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR LARIMER COUNTY FLOODING SAR
So the drone operators are in violation of FAA rules.
I cheated and read the article. They WERE US Defense Contractor drones that FEMA shut down.
That were replaced by manned aircraft that couldn't fly low enough to be as useful. So to summarize,: FEMA came in and replaced something that was probably cheaper, more effective, and safer with something that was more expensive, considerably more dangerous, and useless.
And we wonder why the government can't pass a budget, let alone one that lowers spending.
Wrong NOTAM, as they were in Boulder County, not Larimer County. There is a NOTAM for Lyons, but since the drone operators were operating under Boulder County SAR's authority, they were not violating it.
I don't think that's what the article says, but you might have to know some things about FAA regs for them to make sense.
"It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly in some parts of Colorado."
They most likely have a conditional certificate to fly only in particular areas of low traffic/population for an experimental drone. That's similar to having a pilots license (approval to fly a plane), or even a drivers license (approval to drive a car).
NOTAM's, or NOTice to AirMen are temporary restrictions on ALL flight operators. Think of them as a construction detour in your car, or a bridge washed out barricade. A common NOTAM might be that a runway is closed for resurfacing, or that a chuck of airspace is blocked off for an air show.
So while they may have general approval to fly, the NOTAM cancels that for the specific area covered. Most likely the FAA has delegated to FEMA the ability to control all flights in this box as they coordinate SAR, Search and Rescue operations.
So to extend my car analogy, it's like there's a washed out bridge from a flood, and they put up a barricade across the road while they tried to recuse someone from the flood waters and these people simply drove around the barricade and said "we're here to help!". The answer was get back on the other side of the barricade, or be arrested.
Apparently you didn't even read the NOTAM.
"Altitude: From the surface up to and including 13000 feet MSL"
I actually got the wrong NOTAM, which is why the date is wrong. The right one is http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4333.html and was issued back on September 14th. It says "Altitude: From the surface up to and including 11500 feet MSL"
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.
On Thursday afternoon while all National Guard aircraft were grounded due to weather Falcon UAV was proud to have been the only aircraft that was able to take flight to support the flood efforts in Lyons.
So nothing was flying that day. Except for the drones.
Just as Falcon UAV was off to another damage assessment in Lyons, Colorado we were requested to standdown for National Guard helicopters now supporting evacuation efforts.
So they stopped flying due to this request.
Enter FEMA.......
Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm raveged community.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
So helicopters were not the issue. The CAP as well as civilians had planes in the air. Do you really think the national guard would have wanted civilians in the air if they were conducting helicopter flights? If FEMA would have had any intelligence they would have given them the 30 minutes to image the area. This had nothing to do with helicopter safety. It was some ass at FEMA on a power trip and not wanting to look bad because they couldn't have done this. Or best case, who ever made the decision at FEMA didn't want to be held accountable if something went wrong.
Here. Let me explain that to you with a diagram: http://i.imgur.com/nSD3ofw.gif
This.
I honestly don't think FEMA came in and told them to leave just to be bossy. They are in charge of the area, and having drones flying around their airspace is just one more thing they have to worry about / deal with / be at risk of running into. Could this have been handled better? Yes. It sounds like the drones were providing a valuable service, and in hindsight it would probably make sense for FEMA to try to collaborate here.
The most likely scenario in my mind is that FEMA has a plan on how they will handle this situation. The plan comes from tons of experience with disaster relief. While these [don't call them] drones provide functionality that is useful, they do not know how to work them in with the things they know they have to do. If they take time to figure out how to leverage the option available they risk dropping the ball on issues that they know are time critical. And we all know how well that will go over in the press and popular opinion.
I think it is unfortunate that they were not able to be more flexible with their plan - obviously all plans have to react to the realities of the situation, so they have some flexibility, just not enough in this case. It will be interesting to see if they do a postmortem and add [don't call them] drones to their future response plans.