Macon-Bibb County Government Wants $5.7 Million Drone Fleet For Emergencies

McGruber writes: Macon-Bibb County, Georgia is considering a $5.7 million project with manufacturer Olaeris to deploy 15 to 17 drone aircraft. The aircraft, each bigger than a king-sized bed, would operate out of individual hangars strategically placed across the county. The drones would be able to get to most places in the county within a few minutes. They would be available to the county's Emergency Management Agency, sheriff's office and fire department. "It's highly technical, and having the ability to be the first with Silicon Valley-type technology is unique," said Don Druitt, director of the Macon-Bibb County Emergency Management Agency.

Olaeris claims that for every $1 spent on their drones, a government will save $6 to $8 worth of manpower. "Ninety-five percent of all fire alarms are false, but fire departments have no choice to go, and you may have 15 (firefighters) responding," Olaeris CEO Ted Lindsley said. Lindsley also promises to work with local organizations to address any privacy concerns from residents. People will be able to track the aircraft online whenever they're used in order to learn where and why they were deployed.

Comments

Might make sense

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense. That would seem to address the bulk of the privacy issues, and its difficult to be too sympathetic with most of the other ones.

Re:Might make sense

[tompaulco]

I mean its kinda hard to say if the economics really do make sense or not, but its at least plausible. And frankly, if the location and purpose of use for each drone is available in near-real-time, then its hardly a spying tool, though it could still be used for surveillance in some sense.

The economics do not make sense. They are trying to save money on already sunk costs. Here's the problem:

They say 95% of the fire calls are false alarms. Fine. 95% of the time, their firefighters respond and - nothing. Wasted trip. However, the firefighters were already on duty. They are getting paid whether or not they're on a call. All you did was waste some diesel. So....you say cut the number of firefighters. Ok, problem is when you do have an event, you need all of those firefighters. So....you can't cut them. They're assuming the mean will cover all cases...when they really have to staff for the worst case scenario. Then, supposing you do use the drone for one of those real events, you have now lost that amount of time to respond. (e.g. if the drone takes 4 minutes to fly somewhere, the real equipment will be delayed by that amount of time.) This could be a big deal as a house fire can double in size every 1-2 minutes and a person can drown and suffer brain damage in 4-6 minutes.

Yes, I was firefighter and paramedic for ten years, and I saw this kind of corner-cutting all the time. It will come back to bite them.

Well, I figure that the firefighters and paramedics will still have to respond despite the drone, or they will lose precious minutes. So, the drone just adds another dollar to the equation. There is no way to cost justify the drones. What they really should say is "we want shiny drones".

Re:Opening themselves up to liability?

[Sowelu]

Well, it could still help with triaging emergency calls. And presumably you still dispatch the firefighters, you just get more power to recall them early if it's obviously a false alarm, or (maybe even better yet) you give them eye-in-the-sky information about what the fire looks like. I could see a view like that improving outcomes in some proportion of calls: either they fight things more effectively, or they save fifteen seconds trying to locate that basement fire on foot and get the water on it faster.

I'm pretty willing to believe what they say about heat signatures. Hot air has a way of escaping. A couple minutes after an alarm goes off, there's got to be heat showing SOMEwhere, even if there's not necessarily a lot of smoke yet. If the experts say you can affirm where there's a fire or not the vast majority of the time, I'm inclined to take their word for it, especially if (going back to triage) there's more fires than manpower at the moment and the opportunity cost of making sure is measured in lives lost at another call.

Re:Opening themselves up to liability?

[Harlequin80]

There is no way they would not respond to a human calling in. However many many calls to the fire service are from automated systems. If you can get a drone on site in 4 minutes and your first crew on site in 12 you have an additional 8 minutes of information on the event to plan responses. Currently they will be making assumptions based on the source of the call. Ok this is an industrial site with lots of false alarms, send 1 crew. This is a site that never had a false alarm with high population count send 5 crews.

Having a drone on site in a shorter period of time will allow them to go. Oh shit this is a huge fire send everyone, or only small or no heat signatures detected the 1 crew on route it enough until further advised.