Macon-Bibb County Government Wants $5.7 Million Drone Fleet For Emergencies 87
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.
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.
Shiny Drone Fleet (Score:4, Funny)
Oh Confederate meat
Your Civil War beards
Go down in defeat
Burma Shave
Might make sense (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Especially when they find out how easy it will be to subcontract out to other interests.
Re:Might make sense (Score:5, Informative)
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 [firehouse.com] and a person can drown and suffer brain damage in 4-6 minutes [ymcahouston.org].
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.
Re:Might make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [firehouse.com] and a person can drown and suffer brain damage in 4-6 minutes [ymcahouston.org].
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".
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It's easy to justify drones economically-- if not now, then really soon when they're cheaper. (They won't always be bigger than king sized beds.)
The important question is, do we want to let the drones get a foot in the door?
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There is no way to cost justify the drones.
There is if you're the one getting the kickbacks.
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I agree with your points - they're all well-reasoned.
What I haven't seen mentioned is the case where the drone arrives first and it's video shows the dispatchers that the fire is much larger/more involved than first reported so the dispatcher can roll additional equipment to the scene while the original trucks are still en route. That would be a major plus for having the drones.
Similarly, if the drone finds that the original report of a massive fire is more like a tiny shed on fire, they could cancel some o
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Figure the responders can still head out, but because the drone can get their first, the response can be dialed back or even called off based on the drone's observations. so instead of 4 or 5 vehicles showing up, only one does (since someone still needs to show just to be sure).
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I had a friend whose house was burned down, and who was injured rescuing a cat he didn't even like. The way he described it, things happened fast. After the fire, he told me he wished that the fire department had arrived five minutes earlier or five minutes later, because each of those would have had much different consequences.
So, yes, a five-minute delay can mean a very great difference, and I wish I could mod you up instead of just agreeing.
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Or you could launch your drone-interceptor drone.
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Watch out for the Tracebuster-buster-buster !
leaving aside the potential for abuse... (Score:2)
Do you think that as long as an organization lets us know that "People will be able to track the aircraft online whenever they're used in order to learn where and why they were deployed" we should allow the creepy, annoying presence of machines buzzing around our visual and sonic spheres?
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Well, maybe we shouldn't allow fire trucks to race down our streets with their sirens blaring! Clearly there are pros and cons to different things, but how often do you actually get bothered by a fire truck? What is any more creepy about a drone flying by than a police cruiser sailing down your street? I think its pretty clear the intent here isn't to carry out constant areal surveillance.
I've Been to Macon-Bibb County (Score:3)
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Re:I've Been to Macon-Bibb County (Score:5, Informative)
I live one county over. I can tell you that Bibb desperately needs to spend that money elsewhere. Their schools are sad and the police there are some of the lowest paid in the state. All the places they desperately need money and this is what they come up with. It's typical of Bibb county. A friend of mine I worked with grew up there and moved to Houston county when he was in the 11th grade. He was an A student in Bibb schools and he said he was about a year behind when he moved. He had to work his ass off to catch up.
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I can verify this. I watched a documentary about that place:
http://static.stereogum.com/bl... [stereogum.com]
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Are you counting the meth labs?
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I'm pretty sure the entire county's not worth $5.7 million.
Are you counting the meth labs?
Okay, $5.6 million.
Opening themselves up to liability? (Score:5, Insightful)
“Ninety-five percent of all fire alarms are false, but fire departments have no choice to go, and you may have 15 (firefighters) responding,” Lindsley said. “In most cases the drone can see if there is a heat signature or flames. Maybe you send one vehicle to monitor it and can send the other (firefighters) to a major wreck on a highway.”
If someone calls in a fire or accident and the first department sends a drone first to see if the caller is lying, I forsee some big liability lawsuits if someone dies because the fire department was delayed by the time it takes to get a drone in the air and verify the fire. Or worse, if the drone flies out, doesn't detect the fire in the basement, and the call is cancelled as a false alarm.
Will taxpayers really get $6M of value out of the fleet?
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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
Re:Opening themselves up to liability? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
911: what's your emergency?
Homeowner: I called 30 minutes ago for a firetruck because of an electrical fire in my basement, where are they!?
911: Oh, we sent a drone to look at your house, it didn't see any fire from the air.
Homeowner: Well my basement is still full of smoke, and I can hear electrical arcing
911: Can you see smoke or flames from the outside of your house?
Homeowner: No, just the basement
911: Wait until the flames have burnt through the roof or walls of the house then give us a call and we'll send another drone. If we see a fire at that time, we'll refund the $99.99 "false alarm" fee from the first drone. Please make sure that you really see flames this time, as you only 3 false alarms before we stop sending out the drone. Those things are expensive to operate, you know.... maybe go down and try fanning the flames to see if you can really get the fire going you call us again.
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.
Have any fire fighting experts claimed that you can reliably detect an early stage house fire with a drone? Will you be as inclined to take their word for it if you call in a fire, and the fire department says they couldn't see it from the air, so you must be lying about it?
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Once it's fully engulfed the fire department is pretty much limited to making sure none of the neighbors houses catch fire.
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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
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Holding the country liable because it's a government entity may be difficult. On the other hand, when you deprive hicks in the sticks a legal means of recourse, they tend to get violent. The real life version of the Dukes aren't above setting fire to a nursing home insulated from their misdeeds by tort reform.
Re:Opening themselves up to liability? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, garbage all the way down. If an alarm goes off, they don't just send firefighters to cruise around the outside of the building; they have to go inside and verify that there's no fire. I can't imagine what a drone could report that would prevent a truck from rolling.
This doesn't even begin to pass the sniff test.
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If the drone is the size of a king sized bed, I don't see why they couldn't outright include some degree of fire suppression hardware - not enough to put out a major building fire, but a couple dozen kilos of fire suppression system rapidly deployed to a fire would certainly not go awry until ground crews can get there.
But anyway, the example given was when the fire department has a call for a fire and a call for a major accident on the freeway - the drone could check out the probable false alarm while the
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If the drone is the size of a king sized bed, I don't see why they couldn't outright include some degree of fire suppression hardware - not enough to put out a major building fire, but a couple dozen kilos of fire suppression system rapidly deployed to a fire would certainly not go awry until ground crews can get there.
Assuming you're talking about a house fire, unless the fire has burned through the roof, all a couple of kilos of fire suppression chemicals is going to do is stain the roof. And if the fire *has* burned through the roof, all it's going to do is piss off the fire -- it'll take thousands of gallons of water to suppress it at that point.
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A drone the size of a king-sized bed probably has a payload in the ballpark of maybe 20 kilos - the weight of a refrigerator**. We're not talking about a little kitchen fire extinguisher here. You could haul around a 120psi hose system powerful enough to break windows with that kind of payload.
"thousands of gallons of water to suppress it"? Given that those are the sort of quantities planes drop on wildfires (per run) over several acres per run in order to suppress them, you're thinking too big.
** - I'd cal
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A drone the size of a king-sized bed probably has a payload in the ballpark of maybe 20 kilos - the weight of a refrigerator**. We're not talking about a little kitchen fire extinguisher here. You could haul around a 120psi hose system powerful enough to break windows with that kind of payload.
20kg is around 5 gallons of fire supression - even a home sprinkler head will discharge around 20 gpm, and you'll have more than one in a typical room. Set off a pair of those for 15 minutes and you've already got 600 gallons of water in the house.
"thousands of gallons of water to suppress it"? Given that those are the sort of quantities planes drop on wildfires (per run) over several acres per run in order to suppress them, you're thinking too big.
A 1.5" handline can supply up to 200 gpm, so I figured it'd take at least 5 or 10 minutes to knock down the fire. This house fire [timesunion.com] took 75,000 gallons of water. When a nearby house was on fire, I saw 3 pairs firefighters each with a line (2 looked like maybe 1.5",
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We're not talking about completely dousing a housefire. We're talking about buying a small amount of time until ground crews can get there. And I notice you have no comment about the analogy with aircraft-based wildfire suppression.
An 18 rotor aircraft designed to carry a person for up to 20 minutes is not really comparable with a 3 fan long endurance surveillance drone.
1. Smaller numbers of larger rotors are more efficient than larger numbers of smaller rotors.
2. Endurance is a function of payload. So if
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Will taxpayers really get $6M of value out of the fleet?
One of the articles claims that the drones are intended to eventually replace helicopters. If the drones do actually replace helicopters, then I can see taxpayers getting $6M value from the fleet.
Back in 2012, two Atlanta police officers were killed when their police helicopter crashed; they had been flying very low while looking for a lost child. The subsequent NTSB investigation determined that the crash was caused by “the pilot’s failure to maintain sufficient altitude during maneuvering
Worst possible example. (Score:2)
So most fire alarms are false alarms so the solution is to delay deployment of the fire department until a drone can see if the fire is real? He can't really be suggesting that because that would mean he's a complete fucking moron. The faster the response time of a fire department to an actual fire the lower the loss of life and the less property damage. If you are going to wait 30 minutes for a drone to launch and fly over the fire you are going to basically kill everyone that's in the building and burn do
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Yeah, it's a very poor example.
Monitoring wildfires is probably a better use so that resources can be deployed more efficiently. Sending drones out as forward recon for significant police calls might be valuable.
With the right back end, it could allow for regular low level photography of the entire county so that their property tax records can be sync'd with the actual # and size of structures on land, but that's probably no something the population would be interested in (and it can be done with sat photo
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You forgot the fuel, maintenance and spare parts. I'd be willing to bet daily operating costs will be equivalent to having a plane up.
A plane is a plane, doesn't really matter if it's manned or not, it's still going to cost about the same, unless you think you can train bob the high school drop out to fly a drone and the drones operate on hugs and happy thoughts.
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Or, we could RTFA before calling someone a "complete fucking moron". What was actually said:
He's not saying "ignore fires because we have drones". He's saying "use drones
Re:Worst possible example. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you honestly think that such a thing even happens you are as foolish as him. You are creating a straw man with an event that's as rare as unicorn sightings.
Many of these budgets have fixed costs, for example you have 20 firefighters sitting around 24/7/365 (multiple shifts). And these firefighters aren't in new york responding to calls every few minutes. They spend 90% of every day sitting on their ass, just like every other sub-urban/rural firefighter.
I see your malfunction now. You seem to think that drones fly themselves. That the guy sitting there flying the drone is invisible and doesn't cost salary and overhead. That the drone itself doesn't require maintenance, fuel, parts or will need a ground crew. You are WRONG. The drone is going to cost almost as much to operate as it would cost to put a plane up (except it's cheaper to buy than a plane). And the guy flying it? He's going to cost as much as a highly trained pilot because he's going to be one. This thing is the size of a fridge, it falls out of the sky and lands on someone it's going to kill them. The FAA isn't going to allow anything that size to be flown without someone with a pilots license behind the controls, as they've already decreed BTW.
You also seem to be of the view that drones are miraculous and can spot people in a gutter or a lost child in a forest. People in manned helicopters have a hard time spotting that stuff, how on earth do you think a drone could do it so easy?
Drones aren't miracles. You seem to think they are. This plan is nothing more than some jackass with a hobby that wants the taxpayers to fund it.
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If you honestly think that such a thing even happens you are as foolish as him. You are creating a straw man with an event that's as rare as unicorn sightings.
If you honestly think that rescue workers don't get multiple calls at the same time to deal with and that such a concept is "as rare as unicorn sightings" then you need to spend some more time with rescue workers.
Many of these budgets have fixed costs, for example you have 20 firefighters sitting around 24/7/365 (multiple shifts). And these firefighte
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I don't see that number anywhere in the link you provided.
What I do see is that it has a population of 156,462, over 266 square miles. The FD has a budget of $25.6 million. None of that seems unreasonable.
13,000 fire calls, though? Detroit, Michigan is blatantly famous [google.com] for its ongoing and recurrent structure fires with its population of ~688,000 [citation [google.com]]. Even Detroit only sees 30,000 fire calls a year, of
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Really, you couldn't find that number? Under "Suppression"?
I did give you the cite. You suck at using the internet.
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Rather, you suck at making citations.
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Flame retardant payloads? (Score:2)
Anyone know how much flame retardant you'd need in order to have an effect? Not every kind is useful on every fire, but if you could feasibly actually start fighting a fire before humans arrive on the scene...well, score. I have no idea if you could realistically put enough to be useful on a drone of this size though.
Hell, even if you aren't directly fighting an industrial fire or something, it'd be nice to dust nearby buildings' roofs with something to keep it from spreading as fast.
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If you picture it as "aircraft with 1-2 orders of magnitude more payload are used to control wildfires", the concept of a drone-mounted fire suppression for house-scale fires to buy time for ground fire crews really doesn't sound that unrealistic. It's not going to put out a 3-alarm blaze, but it's going to buy you time.
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And if you picture it AS that, then you need a quick lesson in critical thinking.
"aircraft with 1-2 orders of magnitude more payload are used to control wildfires" is patently false - at best they make many many runs to try and wet down areas to control the flow of wildfires in locations where they think that may help.
That and the fact the a drone could, for example, dump a small load of retardant foam on your nice (almost certainly not flammable) roof, while the fire enjoys spreading like 'wildfire' throug
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Yes, they make many, many runs. And that doesn't apply here... why? Especially given that they're looking at, what, 17 drones available?
A drone the size of a king-sized bed doesn't have to just "dump"; you're talking a payload in the ballpark of maybe 20 kilos. That's more than enough to have a ~120 PSI pump that can break windows. Or a fire grenade launcher, or many other options.
that's Olaeris's story (Score:2)
Go fly a kite Mr Druitt (Score:1)
Make it friendly-looking (Score:2)
Like this one [cgsociety.org], maybe?
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It should refer to everyone as "citizen" when giving them orders, with each sentence containing a mix of friendly and not-so-friendly words. Examples:
CITIZEN, PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR DWELLING AT ONCE.
CITIZEN, WE REQUEST THAT YOU COMPLY IMMEDIATELY.
Double points if whatever display it uses as its face is jarringly discordant with the implicitly (or explicitly) threatening commands it's giving. ;)
Real helicopters (Score:2)
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Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
5.7 million wouldn't buy you ONE reasonable sized, used, helicopter that was airworthy, much less a medevac equipped one.
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Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
5.7 million wouldn't buy you ONE reasonable sized, used, helicopter that was airworthy, much less a medevac equipped one.
You are apparently severely misguided about the prices of used helicopters. The most expensive one on this [airexcell.us] page is $1.195 million, and happens to be a Medevac equipped helicopter, and all of them are absolutely airworthy.
Here [nj.com] is another article in which the NJ police department tried and failed to sell their old Medevac helicopters for $3.3 million each. The NJ Port Authority did manage to sell a 2004 model for $3.3 million and a 1984 model for $1 million. The NJ Police craft we 20 years old (in 2010) and
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Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you? No, you don't. Once decent intermediate twin medevac copter costs about $12M. Each. To say nothing of the enormous maintenance and crew costs.
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Buy some real helicopters, then you can get humans there to do something about the problem. You could probably get about 5 well equipped medevac equipped helicopters on the used market for $5.7 million.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you? No, you don't. Once decent intermediate twin medevac copter costs about $12M. Each. To say nothing of the enormous maintenance and crew costs.
Not to rain on your parade of mocking him, but 5 seconds of googling turned this up... http://www.aerotrader.com/list... [aerotrader.com]
Hardly fully medevac equipped but used and under 500K. Maybe he isn't the only one who doesn't know what he is talking about.
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That's why counties like the one in question don't have and don't want to get into the helicopter fleet business. T
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You also probably missed the part of my link taking 5 seconds of googling, so no its not a link to a used medevac chopper..
Here is one... http://www.medwow.com/used-air... [medwow.com]
A hair over a million bucks and they have two immediately available.... that took another 5 seconds of googling.. I imagine an actual search could turn up something bette
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Good thing this is Georgia and not Alabama. About a 2 hour drive south of Atlanta, who's trying to make themselves into a combination Silycon Valley / Hollywood for the South East. Atlanta has already started considering towns as far north as Ellijay and Blue Ridge to be "Suburbs" with a combined sustained population less than 50K over 825 square miles. Up in this region, most of the local EMCs have rolled out Fiber capable of 50Mbps symmetrical or better all over the rural mountains. These are towns ab
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About a 2 hour drive south of Atlanta, who's trying to make themselves into a combination Silycon Valley / Hollywood for the South East
This should have read: Macon-Bibb county is about a 2 hour drive south of Atlanta; Atlanta being the one who's trying to make themselves into a combination Sillycon[sic] Valley / Hollywood for the South East
Yea, shure.... This is a good idea... NOT (Score:2)
Let's see, 5.7 Million for a fleet of drones....
I'm just wondering if that includes OPERATING costs, licensing costs and maintenance? Yes? For HOW LONG?
What are the weather limitations? Wind speeds, visibility, rain, snow, ice?
I'm thinking it would be much cheaper to put up a couple of tethered balloons carrying some camera gear when the weather is good and go with that. I'm guessing it will be cheaper up front, cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain... Plus, they'd be just about as functional in t
$9 of Manpower? (Score:1)
Country Sheriff (Score:2)
I found a photo of the Macon-Bibb County Sheriff, and I'm not sure he's someone I want in charge of a fleet of drones that are each as big as a king-sized bed.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net... [nocookie.net]
Not going to help (Score:2)
"Ninety-five percent of all fire alarms are false, but fire departments have no choice to go, and you may have 15 (firefighters) responding."
But this isn't going to help with that. You can't wait until you've flown a drone over a fire before you send the truck. Think about how much more property damage there would be, not to mention how many people would die, with the added delay in the case of real fires.
Where do you begin? (Score:1)
These might be good as a supplement, but as a tool for a RIF?
I see commentators talking about the IR for SAR and law enforcement. What do you think you're going to get at this price? What you aren't going to get is what you typically see on TV. That is the images sent from the 5 million dollars a copy military drone. Or the images from the border patrol chopper using the latest military grade IR. NO. Hell no. You're at best going to get a mid grade camera.
Will this drone and pilot make the correct call when