Alberta Firefighters Seek Drones To Help Battle The Wildfire

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The great wildfire in northern Alberta, Canada has already burned an estimated 300,000 hectares and is not nearing an end, as Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, said on Saturday: “In no way is this fire under control.”

The fire has already prompted the evacuation of 88,000 people from the city of Fort McMurray and is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada’s history. More than 500 firefighters, 15 helicopters, 88 fire engines, 12 pieces of heavy equipment and 14 air tankers are currently battling the inferno.

The fire seems unresponsive to conventional fire-suppression tactics. For that reason firefighters and local authorities have turned to a high-tech solution to fight the fire: drones.

Business Insider reports that Elevated Robotic Services — which usually deploys drones for mining companies — has been contracted by the Alberta government to help firefighters pinpoint the cause of the blaze.

Within Fort McMurray, visibility is often less than 10 meters due to the smoke, making it still very dangerous to circulate in the city. Downward wind from helicopter blades can disturb the scene, forcing the pilot to stay about 300 meters in the air. A drone, on the other hand, can capture images from 30 meters.

The drones will take images from the air, and hopefully pinpoint the blaze’s ground-zero location to within a 10 meters radius. From there, investigators can search on foot for potential causes, and use that information to fight the fire.

The drones use cameras outfitted with infrared, ultraviolet and traditional optical cameras to pinpoint the hottest part of the fire and trace it to its source based on time, wind and other factors. The cameras will shoot about 800 images, which are then stitched together in a process called fire-mapping.

Firefighters hope that finding the cause for the fire might help them fight it in some way, although such a fight for now seems like much more than humans or machines can handle.