Conveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area? This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.
I don't think this would even be able to put out a single tree catching fire. Generally the fire is too vertical and the extinguisher would land on the ground and not be activated by the heat, so it won't go off until flaming branches fall down, at which point the fire is too large.
You’re referring to a canopy or crown fire. It depends on conditions, of course, but it usually takes time for enough heat to build up that a fire crowns. There’s generally a period where it will burn through the lower and mid stories and it spreads.
In the area they show in their video it doesn't look like it'd take much for the trees at the edge of the clearing to go up in flames, and pretty fast too.
Exactly my worry. To get to reasonable flight times you need very energy dense batteries which are a potential source of ignition, and good luck putting that out.
My intuition says that in those cases, even partially extinguishing the fire would buy a bit of time, and in the meantime you’ve now got live aerial footage of the fire’s location and progress to better inform the people who are responding to it.
… in other words, putting out the fire with the UAS is a “best case”, and may happen more often than you’d think, but really it’s mostly marketing. That doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t provide real value.
It will be in great publicity videos, with FEMA kicking in funds for purchase grants. Local firefighters will have fun playing with new toys funded by further deficit spending.
This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.
Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying.
Anything?! This implies they have thought of everything which is a dangerous assumption. I think it's important to ask questions, even (especially?) ones that seem obvious.
Most startups fail. Declaring any one a waste of effort is statistically justified. Alternative reason to read HN: a sadistic desire to watch people fail, and say that I told you so.
This is maybe unnecessarily harsh (but you do you).
I too am mostly here in a more spectating mode when it comes to all the VC startup brained ideas, but its not primarily people that fail, its an entire system of thought, and the money that gets poured into it; its staunch belief in technological determinism combined with highly sophisticated investment schemes and plenty of capital.
I am not going to the race to see the cars maybe crash, its enough to see the cars go round and round in circles.
I am not motivated by the schadenfreude, myself. I was just speaking to motivations that one may have for hanging around a site with a significant startup readership.
Most startups fail. Declaring any one a waste of effort is statistically justified.
IMO very few startups fail entirely. Plenty don't get to the point where they make a profit, and fewer still make a return for their investors, but there are lots of other things startups do that can be considered successes.
For most startups failing is an event that comes at the end of a long journey filled with successes. It would be wrong to only consider the last step.
> Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.
Literally nothing about the linked site suggests that this is the case. The commenter I'm responding to is functioning on unbridled (and in my opinion, irrational) optimism for a company that has one demo video putting out a camp fire.
It takes more than hope to run a company. You have to have a viable idea and execution plan, too.
Ideas that will make their startup better that are realistic, highly likely they are considering:
- 50 drones not one
- make sure they don’t run into each other
- drones of different sizes and speeds
- watch out for power lines
- watch out for birds
- don’t run into planes
- don’t ruin the scenery for hikers by always being aloft
- make sure they are charged
- use as first line of defense before the humans come
- make sure they can’t be hacked
> This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.
Can you identify a technology that didn't have that quality initially? Even a simple thing like a pencil - what a waste of money cutting a precision tube inside a stick and somehow installing a carbon rod, which wears out so fast you can't even finish a book without having to build a whole new one. Oh, and it randomly breaks while you're using it and requires special metal sharpening tools.
If it was obviously cheap and reliable from a quick glance, it would have already been invented at a time before it was so obvious!
Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
You're going to need way more than 50, and they'll need to coordinate dropping on a wide flame front. Also, it's not clear what they're using as a retardant - powders and gasses are almost useless in wildland fires. You need water.
That said, what would be really useful is a surveillance drone we can send out when someone phones in a smoke report. 9 out of 10 times the call is nothing, but we still have to suit up, drive to the station, get in the engine, and go investigate.
You're off by a few orders of magnitude. It's more like 50,000, and that would only work for a very small fire.
Water is heavy and it takes a lot of it to counteract the heat generated by a wildland fire. Which is why water is not the primary tool for fighting wildland fires: McLeods, chainsaws, and bulldozers are. Fuel removal along a one-dimensional perimeter is much easier than bringing in massive quantities of water across a huge two-dimensional area.
The more effective rapid fire fighting becomes, perversely there is more demand to tolerate more fuel near structures because there is less expectation of losses. If that demand is met, when the rapid response fails, the fire will be more catastrophic.
It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable confidence.
This is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0].
Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems.
They aren't actually detecting the fires, according to this article linked on their press page:
Each drone would be parked inside a secure shelter and launched in response to fire-watch cameras or satellite imagery. It would navigate autonomously to the ignition site using “computer vision,” its infrared sensors feeding data to AI software to estimate the size, growth rate, and direction of the fire, before “deciding” whether to drop retardant on the fire, create a firebreak ahead of it, or summon more drones. Human operators would oversee and approve its operations.
Satellites are already used to detect hotspots. The Alert camera network [1] catches a lot too. On days where fire would be dangerous, there are already planes ready to go to get the fire before it gets large.
At best, this would provide more coverage more quickly by forward deploying drones. But planes are fast enough and you only need to use a smaller plane on a small fire, and we have plenty of them. Sure seems like techies had a bright idea who either failed to do the research or failed to give up after doing the research because it makes such a great presentation for investor storytime.
Plus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an environmental investigator in government who was regularly brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FLIR/IR looking for grow ops and do paralell construction when they were more illegal as well.
Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
It's a nice effort, but not terribly practical. They can't have the drones performing surveillance over wild lands for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a crashed drone could start a fire. They also make noise that can disturb wildlife and humans enjoying the wilderness.
Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
High altitude, long endurance drones with long range IR sensors to detect flames. Use solar panels and high power density batteries and it could fly around for months. BAE has a HALE UAV that can run for a whole year at high altitudes (PHASA-35). Use a wide angle IR camera for course detection and a zoom camera for identification. Images and location telemeters down to forest ranger base stations. It wouldn't be cheap but at least officials could react appropriately before the fire gets out of control. You could still have these small water drones to keep fires in check before real firefighters can manage it on the ground. You could even cheap out a little on the year long flight UAVs and just run them continuously during the dry season.
Hi guys/gals, (I know HN typically prefers comments with more substance but) I just want to praise what an amazing project this is and I like how this has a real potential of saving lives, property and ecosystem. I wish you are able materialize your mission!
I can totally see this being adapted for crowd control. Gathering has exceeded X amount of allowed people in one area, deploy tear gas and countermeasures.
The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small, localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives.
I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run.
Take those drones and replace the water bombs with extra fuel tanks or batteries, so they can fly longer. Have automated patrols looking for fires daily, so that we can control small forest fires carefully- while letting them burn.
Living near something doesn't make one an expert in that thing. I live near a school, but I'm still fairly worthless as an elementary school teacher or administrator.
The grandparent poster seems to be commenting about relative risk rather than personal expertise. You may not make a good elementary school teacher or administrator, but it would make sense for you to have an opinion on how the school manages traffic. Certainly you wouldn't value my opinion since I don't live by the school and even if I had expertise in school traffic management I might not have your interests in mind.
That said, I don't agree with the poster's attitude. (For the record, I live next to, and essentially in a large forest.) A controlled burn could get out of hand, but in general, controlled burns will do so less frequently than an unplanned wildfire if we aren't doing controlled burns. Or, in other words, whatever short term risk there is from a controlled burn near me is paid back by a reduced overall long term risk. Since I have no plans to sell my home (and even if I did, because I care about other people) controlled burns is a clear path forward from my point of view.
To have some accountability for people who are supposed to make tough decisions and resolve tradeoffs in some responsible way.
Notably this isn’t a direct democracy, where direct democrats have an unfortunate tendency to demand freedom from the consequences of the policies they themselves enact, and ask for the irreconcilable.
I live in a location that is more or less impervious to the effects of climate change and rising sea levels but I still support the development of technology like dams that will save lives in the face of rising sea levels. This is no different
It is different. Its a solution to a symptom that will make the problem worse.
This tech could be used to control small fires and direct them away from populated areas, but that's not how it's being sold.
The saving grace for the company could be them educating customers on effective use to prevent large scale fires, but I'm unsure if they do such a thing.
AFAIK, it's now long (40+ years) that (at least on the west coast) periodic small fires are not only beneficial, but necessary, and that the US policy of "stop ALL fires" has been long-term extremely problematic. Mostly the "knowing" of this was finally accepting that the ways of those who originally lived here (first nations / native americans) were, in fact, better, since such periodic burns were the practice of those people.
AFAIK, the CA forest service have been trying to ramp up the number of small, controlled burns, but it's hard to not only get the funding to do it (in part because it's during the off-seasons) but because it's actually really hard to do because of the buildup up underbrush, which is the very problem the periodic burns address.
It's like a tech debt situation. There's enough tech debt that it's making it harder to pay it down.
I absolutely would not be surprised if forests on the east coast respond very differently to these kinds of burns.
Depends on where. Much of the east coast is wet enough the fires aren't a regular occurrence, and the dead underbrush rots away. I recall one in SE Pennslyvania in the past 30 years.
This is only partially true, even in California. In Southern California, there is far less fuel than in prehistoric times, because there are more fires, and more high-severity fires from more ignition sources. In NorCal, the biggest blocker is often the local air quality district refusing permits for a controlled burn in the wildland, because it would cause unhealthful air. Which it would. So instead we wait for PG&E to accidentally a power line and make dangerous air quality.
None of this invalidates your argument, but adds IC engines to the list of tech debt. Long unsolved policy problems are usually unsolved for a reason :frown:.
Alternatively, this allows you to burn when you want to, such as when conditions are favorable to maintain control of the fire. You're correct that preventing large fires is important - control burns must be part of the solution.
Yeah, we should definitely put out small fires in August and let (or force) bigger ones to burn in March.
Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.
You think controlled burns during fire season are a good idea?
I agree with you that controlled burns are good, but I'm saying a 'controlled burn' is impossible from Aug-rainfall.
And sure, letting the entire Sierra burn is one solution, but we have the technology to do controlled burns when appropriate and not let wildfires run unfettered. Those are not mutually exclusive.
Hence the 'critical thinking' snark.
The answer to stopping massive wildfires is not to stop fighting them whole cloth, because, surprise California's equilibrium burn pre-contact was probably 4m acres/year anyway!
I would be interested to hear from a scientist on a couple questions I've had around this thinking:
I've read that because of this built up material AND dead trees from beetle kill, no water or snow, etc that the fires burn too hot and kill the regenerative seeds. Is this true?
If so how does that factor into the balance of that decision?
And do they take into account the carbon and pollution emitted that's a HUGE net negative? Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve
Plus landslides and instability.
I think I've also read burn scars don't absorb and retain as much water - but I'm not as confident in that memory?
> Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve
We've been trying to "flatten the curve" for the past century. Turns out that was a bad idea. The only way too get back to a healthy ecosystem at this point is to allow a hundred years of excess built up fuel to burn.
California had artificially pleasant (i.e mostly wildfire-free) summers for many years. The next few decades will be paying the price for that.
Isn't this a very norm biased idea. I think geo engineering gets too much of a bad rap. It's powerful and thus massive mistakes have and will be made, but we're only going to get better at it. Why resign ourselves. Would logging at sufficient amounts help, could we better smooth the release of water and fix this? I sort of hate the modern environmentalisms insistence that we should just throw up our hands and anything else is inherently bad.
Just log out the whole forest you say? Removing the forest has the same problem as doing nothing about the fires. People want to have houses in the forest
"Our previous attempts at environmental engineering have created bigger problems than we started with, due to unforeseen complexities in the system... what should we do?"
"I know! Let's grab this tiger's tail even harder"
Have they all failed though? We feed billons of people based mostly on massive changes we've made to the growable parts of the world. We've drained most of the Netherlands and they seem pretty happy. England is treeless because of our work and they seem pretty ok. Idk it's more like we got burned and now have decided to never try cooking again. I think it's quite easy to convince me we should try to structure life in a way that minimizes the interventions we need to do and that any particular thing we could do is bad, but just saying it ins't natural or that we've been wrong before won't cut it for me, not when we need to make big changes not when doing nothing doesn't actually mean the world stays the same.
Humanity is not just eating our seed corn, we're burning it for heat. If you think we can get away with that indefinitely, you are far more optimistic than I will ever be.
Well it seems like we're going to need some more corn then right? The idea that we can and should go back to the natural carrying capacity of earth would if implemented result in billions dying and we don't make a bigger pie without flexing our muscles a bit
But I could also see the maths working out that even if we say only slow by 30% that's enough to give us another __ idk say 5 years to get fully renewable.
Thinking along those lines. I have NO idea if that is even possible true on the whole and just fake numbers I obviously don't know, hence asking.
I don't think it meshes well with Spanish wildfire stats [1]. I can't see any serious trend there, definitely nothing like California. The main difference is that they manage their forests and do prescribed burning.
I don't think a system like this is comparable to the 10 a.m. policy of attempting to totally suppress all wildfires. It still makes sense to quickly detect and suppress all unwanted wildfires. And as far as I know, the proposed solution to the 10 a.m. policy isn't to just randomly let some percentage of natural wildfires burn as much as they want, but rather to do prescribed burns (and still fight to control and extinguish unwanted wildfires).
I read about this a few months back and it seems that a key issue with controlled burns is liability. No-one wants to be responsible if the wind blows in an unexpected direction and it gets out of control. They’re scared of the variables. And of course, the less you burn, the greater the risk when you do burn, so it’s a vicious cycle.
One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line". Where embers fly ahead of the main fire, starting spot fires that unless dealt with just extend the reach of the fire. Currently a lot of spot fire management is attempted using helicopters with water buckets, but this is both expensive and bloody dangerous. Being able to use semi disposable drones could assist dramatically.
There are however a number of problems I can see that this approach will have to overcome.
- You need to preposition the drone in such a way that it can remain charged and also is protected from any potential bush fire before it's utilised. This could be achieved with a fire protected, solar powered shelter, but this significantly increases the cost. Maybe they could be deployed from a long duration aircraft?
- The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. I'm not seeing the average off the shelf drone deal with smoke, particles and embers and still function effectively. Also the sensor package will have to deal with restricted view as well as reduced GPS/Radio caused by smoke/firestorm interference.
That said, this system could be very effective in dealing with smaller locations, close to built up areas where you can target deployment for those high risk fire ban periods.
> - The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment.
This is a good point. Bushfires are also largely caused by high winds that are unpredictable. It makes drones carrying heavy fire retarding payloads a very difficult proposition.
I wonder if a fixed wing drone would be able to carry a heavier payload for a given range. Moreover, these things don’t have to be electric; it’s not like the carbon emissions would be significant.
I'm going to qualify this by saying this is specifically in my professional patch.
The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable. Landscape scale fires are driven by regional scale winds. Yes, there are some semi-complex interactions between terrain, atmospheric conditions, etc, but these are able to be modelled quickly and effectively. Stating that the winds are unpredictable is actually dangerous.
What is not unusual to see is that front line firefighters will be reporting a wind travelling in toward the front of the fire, and that this completely contradicts what predictive fire behaviour reports suggest. What they are seeing is that the fire is creating a convective updraft which necessitates an indraft that is probably contrary to regional wind direction. The fire will still, largely speaking, progress in the direction that the regional winds push it.
Perhaps your statement could have been improved by suggesting that the wind indraft near a landscape scale fire is both happening at a high speed, but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
There is a further issue of landscape scale. It is completely ridiculous to place these things all over the landscape. They would be much better as a deployable capability when there is a fire going so that new ignitions can be addressed. That said, most places with large bushfires have helicopters deployed with a much higher capacity for extinguishment than the retardant balls.
I find myself asking, as someone who loves new tech developments, "is this just new tech with glossy marketing for the sake of new tech?"
> The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable.
They are on a drone scale (the purpose of my comment) and you've acknowledged this yourself:
> but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
> What is not unusual to see is that front line firefighters will be reporting a wind travelling in toward the front of the fire, and that this completely contradicts what predictive fire behaviour reports suggest. What they are seeing is that the fire is creating a convective updraft which necessitates an indraft that is probably contrary to regional wind direction.
Considering that "wind" is how we describe "air moving", they're not wrong, they're just looking at it from a very different scale to you.
Wow, that's a really great point. If we have these sorts of drones helping to contain and manage the allowed fires, in an automated fashion, we can reduce the effort needed to do so, or perhaps even control larger fires.
Meta: this kind of back and forth is what makes HN so awesome. Thank you everyone for keeping open minds. I learn a lot from good-faith back-and-forth like this.
Too pessimistic is a great, generous way, to summarize your biases which are those shared by most laypeople and even some self professed experts. Don’t try to turn wild fire into some stupid binary like everything else on tv, where you choose a side “pro-fire” or “anti-fire” and then insist that your way is the only one worthy of consideration.
Controlled burns, which it seem you favor, do not imply an absence of firefighting. It’s not “fire, good or bad?” Even though many seem to want to have that sort of debate. It’s an idiotic way of thinking.
The tech already exists, however the regulatory environment is not there (yet) for wide-spread automated beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.
There are many indigenous plant species that do not germinate by fire (e.g., northofagus) and these populations are under threat as fires encroach on areas that have long been refuge for fire-sensitive plants. If a fire wipes out these populations, gum trees grow in their place and it takes up to half a millennium for these to die off. On the other hand, fire-tolerant plants are plentiful in places like Australia.
But not too often. we are losing forests because a second fire is coming through before the first generation of trees reached maturity. Once that happens, there is no coming back.
> One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line".
It's also a big problem with pine forest fires. The trees and their cones explode and when combined with the generated heat, the fire can jump over a three or four lane road in an instant. That creates spreading and accelerating fires which can go on for days and burn extremely big areas down.
We had a similar fire around a decade ago in a region that I go yearly, and it was a sad view to say at least. Kilometers of road under the shadow of trees were barren, black/brown mountains covered with ash and other unpleasant things. The region is healing by itself and help from forest services and volunteers, but it shows that keeping fires small is very hard.
We can't let them burn at any time of year, because people have moved into the forest all over and we're liable off their property burns or they die.
First step, laws made to remove any liability for fire damage outside urban areas. Make it clear fires are coming and they must have a fire-proof house. But we won't, because the rich will use the poor who can't afford to rebuild their homes as a shield against anyone being held accountable.
But the answer to this isn't to just let fires start whenever and not put them out. When they start on hot, windy days they can destroy cities. The right answer is some combination of controlled burns (on cool days) and stopping random wildfires as soon as they start.
Use those drones to seed locally appropriate mushroom species with spore sprays. Even better, preemptively identify piles of deadwood and prioritize larger piles. Bonus points if the mushrooms are edible. Double bonus points if they're magic.
More mushrooms means more water retention, less fuel that's less dry overall, and a niche in the ecosystem is filled , expanding activity in the adjacent niches, which in turn speeds the disappearance of biodegradable mass.
To clarify, just add spores to the water before deploying, it'll still be just as good in suppressing fires, and it reduces long term buildup. Win/Win!
I understand that this is true for some forests but not all. Lots of California forests need to burn their underbrush and would do so without human intervention. Out gorge in Oregon is not supposed to do this though.
> The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small.
No, the reason why the fires are so terrible is because we build way too fucking close to forests. When your house is a couple hundred meters away from a forest that's prone to catch fire, say goodbye to your house in case of a large forest fire.
We need to stop encroaching on nature so hard when building settlements, just like our ancestors did - they respected that nature needs distance from humans. Not just because of fires, but also because of pandemics, landslides, floods, hurricanes, storms... nature is dangerous, no matter how technologically advanced we become as a species - it seems as if humanity has gotten a bit megalomaniac in that regard, and we are all paying the price each year for that. And it's not going to get better, only worse with how climate change has increased the severity of extreme weather events.
Alternatively: make it clear to people that in the case they want to live in a fire-prone area, they have to protect (e.g. invest in deep underground water tanks for a powerful sprinkler system) and insure themselves. There will be no public investment or action in firefighting for areas designated fire-prone. Why should firefighters have to risk their lives for people who knowingly built houses in a fire-prone area?
The surveillance and response part is interesting. I can't imagine drones that size can deliver an effective response. Especially if the fire is in a tree crown (lightning strike) and not in a neat bounded campfire ring.
Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
Yeah. No. As Mr. Wonderful like to say, take it behind the barn and shoot it.
Even a swarm of these cannot compare to the awesome power of small and large (Sikorsky) helicopters as well as medium to large (Boeing 707-class) tanker aircraft attacking a fire.
I have lived in fire country half my life. You NEVER get to fires when it's a convenient pile of logs in the middle of an accessible clearing that a drone can hover 20 feet above to precision drop suppressant balls. The more likely scenario is that, by the time it is detected you have to drop swimming-pool quantities of water or suppressant multiple times. And, of course, let's not even discuss a decent amount of wind and everything that goes with the situational awareness that pilots have.
Neat tech, but I think prescribed burns are probably better for the general health of the forest ecology. Furthermore, prescribed burn uses a smaller tech stack (less dependencies on high tech) and is more resilient to logisitical and tech failures.
Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when designing a site.
I do wonder how they're going to get enough coverage. There are plenty of places where a fire might start that are dozens of miles from the nearest road. You'd presumably want to deploy the base camps in some sort of grid, which would mean a whole lot of hiking things in on horses.
I'm very intrigued by the potential for new wildfire tech but as someone who lives in wildfire land in Montana i have my doubts about this video... detecting putting out a campfire is a pretty idealized case.
Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc
The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out.
I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.
You have some good points and questions here. I spent 3 summers as a wildland fire fighter and have seen lightening strikes/small fires up to massive 100k acre affairs. I will speak from that experience, but keep in mind it was over a decade ago and it's been a while since I had to think about any of this.
As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive.
You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area.
You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land?
You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews.
Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.
Great points especially about needing to actually cut trees. I've never been on a fire crew though friends and family members have been hot shots and tanker pilots.
I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.
I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.
Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.
A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.
Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.
It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.
On a day where there is actually high fire risk (ie. high wind in hot weather) this system will be too late and not deliver enough retardant to make any difference. In those conditions you will have tens or hundreds of square meters of fire in within that time. Actual fire ignition will usually not be in the open away from other materials as shown in the example. It may be able to stop fires on days when conditions are mild enough to let it run for the ecosystem benefits.
I mean - it looks a LOT like it didn't even put the fire in the video out...
Look at the logs as it starts flying back up - they're clearly still burning, even after the 4 suppressants pop, and then they conveniently cut away very quickly.
Just wondering what the range is on those drones. If you are supposed to be covering 100's of km of bushland you will need a significant number of drones, or they will need to have high speed and long range.
Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.
I wonder if the accurate deliver of fire retardant could be achieved using automated mortars or similar, maybe terminal guidance munition delivered from a high level loitering airship. Your cost may be higher, but I'm thinking that there will be a significant loss rate with drones, and you lose the cost of prepositioning.
The concept is interesting, but would not be easy to deploy the extinguisher agent like they where some kind of artillery shell? Use drones to patrol and find fires, and then just bombard the position from distance?
162 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread… in other words, putting out the fire with the UAS is a “best case”, and may happen more often than you’d think, but really it’s mostly marketing. That doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t provide real value.
Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
99% of startups fail, this one will be no exception to the stats.
Sure, they might succeed, but there's no guarantee they'll make it past this super basic PoC.
They're a startup. That's what startups do. If you think they're wasting their time you're really on the wrong website right now.
I too am mostly here in a more spectating mode when it comes to all the VC startup brained ideas, but its not primarily people that fail, its an entire system of thought, and the money that gets poured into it; its staunch belief in technological determinism combined with highly sophisticated investment schemes and plenty of capital.
I am not going to the race to see the cars maybe crash, its enough to see the cars go round and round in circles.
IMO very few startups fail entirely. Plenty don't get to the point where they make a profit, and fewer still make a return for their investors, but there are lots of other things startups do that can be considered successes.
For most startups failing is an event that comes at the end of a long journey filled with successes. It would be wrong to only consider the last step.
> Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.
Literally nothing about the linked site suggests that this is the case. The commenter I'm responding to is functioning on unbridled (and in my opinion, irrational) optimism for a company that has one demo video putting out a camp fire.
It takes more than hope to run a company. You have to have a viable idea and execution plan, too.
- 50 drones not one - make sure they don’t run into each other - drones of different sizes and speeds - watch out for power lines - watch out for birds - don’t run into planes - don’t ruin the scenery for hikers by always being aloft - make sure they are charged - use as first line of defense before the humans come - make sure they can’t be hacked
Can you identify a technology that didn't have that quality initially? Even a simple thing like a pencil - what a waste of money cutting a precision tube inside a stick and somehow installing a carbon rod, which wears out so fast you can't even finish a book without having to build a whole new one. Oh, and it randomly breaks while you're using it and requires special metal sharpening tools.
If it was obviously cheap and reliable from a quick glance, it would have already been invented at a time before it was so obvious!
That said, what would be really useful is a surveillance drone we can send out when someone phones in a smoke report. 9 out of 10 times the call is nothing, but we still have to suit up, drive to the station, get in the engine, and go investigate.
Water is heavy and it takes a lot of it to counteract the heat generated by a wildland fire. Which is why water is not the primary tool for fighting wildland fires: McLeods, chainsaws, and bulldozers are. Fuel removal along a one-dimensional perimeter is much easier than bringing in massive quantities of water across a huge two-dimensional area.
Also, some ignitions come from known sources (e.g. powerline downing), and monitoring and localization already exists in some cases (PG&E).
I was glad to see this
It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable confidence.
Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems.
[0] https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...
Rough numbers: 3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius) 6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy
Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland.
PG&E is your first customer.
edit: Even if I’m low by an order of magnitude on costs, PG&E is your first customer: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-p...
But realistically you'd want winged drones, otherwise you'd need a large number of bases (power hookups, maintenance, etc.).
You are nearly TWO orders of magnitude off.
Each drone would be parked inside a secure shelter and launched in response to fire-watch cameras or satellite imagery. It would navigate autonomously to the ignition site using “computer vision,” its infrared sensors feeding data to AI software to estimate the size, growth rate, and direction of the fire, before “deciding” whether to drop retardant on the fire, create a firebreak ahead of it, or summon more drones. Human operators would oversee and approve its operations.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/30/can-bay-area-startups...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/startups-working-to-fight-wi...
At best, this would provide more coverage more quickly by forward deploying drones. But planes are fast enough and you only need to use a smaller plane on a small fire, and we have plenty of them. Sure seems like techies had a bright idea who either failed to do the research or failed to give up after doing the research because it makes such a great presentation for investor storytime.
[1] https://www.alertwildfire.org
Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based ignitions, or in high wind in general
Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
I think that's a good idea, since in general fires start when the sun shines.
airship could also assist in surveillance.
I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run.
Take those drones and replace the water bombs with extra fuel tanks or batteries, so they can fly longer. Have automated patrols looking for fires daily, so that we can control small forest fires carefully- while letting them burn.
The actual experts agree with the parent poster.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/06/how-fore...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l...
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
https://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9347361/wildfire-management-pr...
(We could also do what Australia does, and set better standards for buildings and neighborhoods for surviving fires.)
That said, I don't agree with the poster's attitude. (For the record, I live next to, and essentially in a large forest.) A controlled burn could get out of hand, but in general, controlled burns will do so less frequently than an unplanned wildfire if we aren't doing controlled burns. Or, in other words, whatever short term risk there is from a controlled burn near me is paid back by a reduced overall long term risk. Since I have no plans to sell my home (and even if I did, because I care about other people) controlled burns is a clear path forward from my point of view.
No, we have traffic engineers for that.
Decisions should be made based off expertise, not proximity.
Notably this isn’t a direct democracy, where direct democrats have an unfortunate tendency to demand freedom from the consequences of the policies they themselves enact, and ask for the irreconcilable.
These ideas aren't mutually exclusive, I don't know why we are arguing about it.
AFAIK, the CA forest service have been trying to ramp up the number of small, controlled burns, but it's hard to not only get the funding to do it (in part because it's during the off-seasons) but because it's actually really hard to do because of the buildup up underbrush, which is the very problem the periodic burns address.
It's like a tech debt situation. There's enough tech debt that it's making it harder to pay it down.
I absolutely would not be surprised if forests on the east coast respond very differently to these kinds of burns.
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2013/04/07/french-creek-state-park...
Hmm, this makes me question my dismissal of the concerns, but still supports the idea that it's not a long term concern on the east coast.
None of this invalidates your argument, but adds IC engines to the list of tech debt. Long unsolved policy problems are usually unsolved for a reason :frown:.
Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.
I agree with you that controlled burns are good, but I'm saying a 'controlled burn' is impossible from Aug-rainfall.
And sure, letting the entire Sierra burn is one solution, but we have the technology to do controlled burns when appropriate and not let wildfires run unfettered. Those are not mutually exclusive.
Hence the 'critical thinking' snark.
The answer to stopping massive wildfires is not to stop fighting them whole cloth, because, surprise California's equilibrium burn pre-contact was probably 4m acres/year anyway!
I've read that because of this built up material AND dead trees from beetle kill, no water or snow, etc that the fires burn too hot and kill the regenerative seeds. Is this true?
If so how does that factor into the balance of that decision?
And do they take into account the carbon and pollution emitted that's a HUGE net negative? Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve
Plus landslides and instability.
I think I've also read burn scars don't absorb and retain as much water - but I'm not as confident in that memory?
We've been trying to "flatten the curve" for the past century. Turns out that was a bad idea. The only way too get back to a healthy ecosystem at this point is to allow a hundred years of excess built up fuel to burn.
California had artificially pleasant (i.e mostly wildfire-free) summers for many years. The next few decades will be paying the price for that.
"I know! Let's grab this tiger's tail even harder"
But I could also see the maths working out that even if we say only slow by 30% that's enough to give us another __ idk say 5 years to get fully renewable.
Thinking along those lines. I have NO idea if that is even possible true on the whole and just fake numbers I obviously don't know, hence asking.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265354/area-burned-by-w...
There are however a number of problems I can see that this approach will have to overcome.
- You need to preposition the drone in such a way that it can remain charged and also is protected from any potential bush fire before it's utilised. This could be achieved with a fire protected, solar powered shelter, but this significantly increases the cost. Maybe they could be deployed from a long duration aircraft?
- The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. I'm not seeing the average off the shelf drone deal with smoke, particles and embers and still function effectively. Also the sensor package will have to deal with restricted view as well as reduced GPS/Radio caused by smoke/firestorm interference.
That said, this system could be very effective in dealing with smaller locations, close to built up areas where you can target deployment for those high risk fire ban periods.
This is a good point. Bushfires are also largely caused by high winds that are unpredictable. It makes drones carrying heavy fire retarding payloads a very difficult proposition.
The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable. Landscape scale fires are driven by regional scale winds. Yes, there are some semi-complex interactions between terrain, atmospheric conditions, etc, but these are able to be modelled quickly and effectively. Stating that the winds are unpredictable is actually dangerous.
What is not unusual to see is that front line firefighters will be reporting a wind travelling in toward the front of the fire, and that this completely contradicts what predictive fire behaviour reports suggest. What they are seeing is that the fire is creating a convective updraft which necessitates an indraft that is probably contrary to regional wind direction. The fire will still, largely speaking, progress in the direction that the regional winds push it.
Perhaps your statement could have been improved by suggesting that the wind indraft near a landscape scale fire is both happening at a high speed, but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
There is a further issue of landscape scale. It is completely ridiculous to place these things all over the landscape. They would be much better as a deployable capability when there is a fire going so that new ignitions can be addressed. That said, most places with large bushfires have helicopters deployed with a much higher capacity for extinguishment than the retardant balls.
I find myself asking, as someone who loves new tech developments, "is this just new tech with glossy marketing for the sake of new tech?"
They are on a drone scale (the purpose of my comment) and you've acknowledged this yourself:
> but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
Considering that "wind" is how we describe "air moving", they're not wrong, they're just looking at it from a very different scale to you.
Maybe I was too pessimistic.
Controlled burns, which it seem you favor, do not imply an absence of firefighting. It’s not “fire, good or bad?” Even though many seem to want to have that sort of debate. It’s an idiotic way of thinking.
It's also a big problem with pine forest fires. The trees and their cones explode and when combined with the generated heat, the fire can jump over a three or four lane road in an instant. That creates spreading and accelerating fires which can go on for days and burn extremely big areas down.
We had a similar fire around a decade ago in a region that I go yearly, and it was a sad view to say at least. Kilometers of road under the shadow of trees were barren, black/brown mountains covered with ash and other unpleasant things. The region is healing by itself and help from forest services and volunteers, but it shows that keeping fires small is very hard.
First step, laws made to remove any liability for fire damage outside urban areas. Make it clear fires are coming and they must have a fire-proof house. But we won't, because the rich will use the poor who can't afford to rebuild their homes as a shield against anyone being held accountable.
More mushrooms means more water retention, less fuel that's less dry overall, and a niche in the ecosystem is filled , expanding activity in the adjacent niches, which in turn speeds the disappearance of biodegradable mass.
No, the reason why the fires are so terrible is because we build way too fucking close to forests. When your house is a couple hundred meters away from a forest that's prone to catch fire, say goodbye to your house in case of a large forest fire.
We need to stop encroaching on nature so hard when building settlements, just like our ancestors did - they respected that nature needs distance from humans. Not just because of fires, but also because of pandemics, landslides, floods, hurricanes, storms... nature is dangerous, no matter how technologically advanced we become as a species - it seems as if humanity has gotten a bit megalomaniac in that regard, and we are all paying the price each year for that. And it's not going to get better, only worse with how climate change has increased the severity of extreme weather events.
Alternatively: make it clear to people that in the case they want to live in a fire-prone area, they have to protect (e.g. invest in deep underground water tanks for a powerful sprinkler system) and insure themselves. There will be no public investment or action in firefighting for areas designated fire-prone. Why should firefighters have to risk their lives for people who knowingly built houses in a fire-prone area?
Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
Even a swarm of these cannot compare to the awesome power of small and large (Sikorsky) helicopters as well as medium to large (Boeing 707-class) tanker aircraft attacking a fire.
I have lived in fire country half my life. You NEVER get to fires when it's a convenient pile of logs in the middle of an accessible clearing that a drone can hover 20 feet above to precision drop suppressant balls. The more likely scenario is that, by the time it is detected you have to drop swimming-pool quantities of water or suppressant multiple times. And, of course, let's not even discuss a decent amount of wind and everything that goes with the situational awareness that pilots have.
Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when designing a site.
Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc
The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out.
I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.
As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive.
You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area.
You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land?
You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews.
Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.
I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.
I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.
Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.
A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.
Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.
It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.
Look at the logs as it starts flying back up - they're clearly still burning, even after the 4 suppressants pop, and then they conveniently cut away very quickly.
Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.
I guess this is fine if it's only deployed when necessary but I definitely don't want these things buzzing around preemptively.