a fight for progress

The fire service has always fought technology. An industry that has been built on tradition has fought the introduction of technology for the last 200 years. Firefighting, at it's bedrock is made of tactics, strategy and men and women willing to lay it down at all costs to preserve life and property.

The last 20 years has seen a cultural shift in how the modern firefighter performs his/her duties. Technology has had a significant impact in every aspect of firefighting. From our communications and station alerting systems to CAF systems on our apparatus and even the tools we use.

The firefighter of today has access to a fire service driven by technology that our predecessors would have dreamed of with the embrace of modern technology. There is a saying in fire houses today, "The fire service is made up of 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress". Times are changing though. With younger and more innovative firefighters entering the job, technology is finding it's way more and more into every aspect of the fire service. None more than drone technology.

Drone technology, in fairness is a relatively new technology. Especially within the fire service. Truth be told only about a small fraction of the fire departments within the US (even lower globally) have embraced this technology.

One area within the fire service where technology, more specifically drone technology has seen gains is Hazardous Materials response. At least at Southern Manatee Fire Rescue.

SMFR is a smaller fire department located just south of Tampa FL. We are made up of 5 stations, covering a 36 square mile patch of Manatee County. Our HazMat team, however, covers the entire county and even assist surrounding counties with a tri-county agreement.

Southern Manatee began looking into UAS to augment our hazardous materials response back in 2015. The idea was outlandish at the time and was met with resistance, a lot of which honestly, came from me. As I began digging into drones and understanding their strengths and limitations more, I began to see how this technology could fundamentally change how we approach hazmat response.

This of course was not going to be an easy battle. HazMat response has decades of tried-and-true tactics and strategies handed down from generations of firefighters. Adding a "flying toy" (as many have labelled them over the years) to a sophisticated and specialized niche' in emergency response was not going to be easy. We were ready for the challenge though.

The first challenge was "buy in". Not only did we need to get the buy in from our department and administration, but we needed support form the community and our constituents. Transparency had to be the utmost importance.

This technology and what we planned to do with it had to be made accessible to our community, media and anyone who had questions regarding our use of drones. We opened our program up to anyone who was willing to listen. From news stories to public education "truck shows", we we're flying drones for everyone. With a lot of public attention, this also meant we needed to make sure we were "flying by the book". At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was difficult to wade through. Admittedly the FAA had their hands full with hundreds of agencies all jockeying to do the same thing. Today that pathway is much easier and more streamline.

The next hurdle was figuring out when, and how to deploy. There was no established response matrix for drone deployment. Drones were, at the time, being used predominantly by law enforcement and a few fire agencies had started similar programs but no one was using them for hazardous materials response.

We were literally writing the book. We had no idea when the proper time to put the drone in the air was. We knew most agencies were using them for large fires and many wouldn't put the drone up until later in the event. Almost as an afterthought. "Fires out, drone out". We felt that mindset led to lost opportunity.

Meaning, the drone, in its simplest form, is a camera in the sky. The potential reconnaissance that early use of UAS could offer incident commanders is ultimately lost the longer the drone sits on the ground. This was the first mindset we needed to change. UAS Ops needed to be made a critical part of our response. This led to us offering our pilot positions to Technicians only. Technicians all have the same level of training and understand of the flow of how a hazmat scene plays out. The typical rank and file firefighter would be at a disadvantage in our workflow thus potentially hindering response efforts. Also, having our line personnel rather than officers be our dedicated pilots was different from the norm. In most agencies, firefighters/technicians on the scene were needed more in operational capacities rather than standing by the truck flying a drone. Our HazMat technicians are highly trained and extremely technical in this niche part of special operations which is why it made sense for our technicians to become our pilots.

Once we figured out who was going to fly and when, we were off.

We began flying mostly as a situational awareness tool in the beginning. This allowed us to become very good at piloting in almost any environment. We did have our hiccups throughout this journey, but you can't be successful if you're not pushing yourself and your equipment.

The more we learned about drones, the more we were interested in figuring out ways to use our UAS as more than just an "eye in the sky". This led us down a rabbit hole that I believe has fundamentally changed how fire departments and hazmat teams operate in today's theatre of hazardous materials response.

Future posts:

• Drone Flammability testing

• Air monitoring with UAS

• Drone Decontamination

• Mapping Spills in Waterways

Rich Gatanis

Rich Gatanis began his career in 2003 as a Firefighter/EMT/HazMat Technician with Southern Manatee Fire Rescue located in Manatee County, Florida. In 2015, Rich took on the role of UAS Coordinator at SMFR by creating a UAS program within his agency. His innovative and forward thinking led him to develop a device that allows a drone to carry chemical, gas, and radiation detectors into an area to remotely monitor the air in real time using on-board camera systems.