Scott Swanson
It’s early on a Saturday morning and someone’s reported smoke emanating from the site of a fire local agencies had responded to the previous evening, Sept. 3, on a bluff overlooking the South Santiam River and Pleasant Valley Bridge.
Craig Wilson, who’s been a summer firefighter with the Oregon Department of Forestry for 23 years, arrives on the scene. But instead of grabbing hand tools and beating his way through the thick underbrush to check out what’s happening a few hundred feet away, Wilson opens a plastic case and extracts a drone.
It’s his, and he’s been using it to scout fires since he bought it five years ago.
“I was thinking that I could use it in multiple areas,” said Wilson, who’s a P.E. teacher and athletic director at Sweet Home Junior High in his other life.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s found it “really useful” in his forestry role and he says he’s taken advantage of its capabilities many times.
“I can get it in the air really quick,” he said. “It’s good for recon if there’s smoke in the area. I can circle spots where it would take people or vehicles up to an hour to get into. I can do it minutes, seconds. That saves lot of time and fuel.”
Chad Calderwood, wildland protection supervisor for ODF’s Sweet Home district, noted that the department bought a drone about a year ago, following the lead of districts in Southern and Eastern Oregon that had already started using them officially.
He echoed what Wilson had to say about the time and resources that can be saved when a drone is used.
“Launching the drone cuts back time from fire growth, and we can do it in minutes instead of sending four or five engines for several hours.”
Here on Pleasant Valley, Wilson pops the propeller arms into place and fires up the machine, using a cellphone to guide it.
He sends the bird out over yesterday’s burn area, scanning the phone’s screen intently, looking for the source of the reported smoke.
“There’s some spots in there that look like they’ve reignited,” he tells colleague Tomas Rosa, another veteran summer firefighter who teaches and coaches at the high school during the school year. “We might want to get some water on it.”
Drones have made a big difference for local forestry agencies. Cascade Timber Consulting started using one several years ago to survey its forests.
CTC President Milt Moran said his company has actually gone through “several of them” since then.
“They wear out,” he said. “We’ve had a couple crash.”
Moran said drone use makes sense financially and, like Wilson, it saves a lot of time and effort.
“It’s a fairly reasonable tool in cost, compared to manpower, covering a lot of ground for quick recons, looking at timber types, terrains, difficult sites, cliffs and big swampy areas. We can find that real fast with a drone.”
CTC also uses the drone to check on forest health, he said.
“We can take a look at dead trees, say, ‘Why is that open spot in there?'” Moran said.
Another use the company has discovered is rock inventory. The drone can survey one of CTC’s quarries, and operators can use special software to gauge how much rock is in a pit.
“That would take a survey crew of two or three people several hours,” Moran said. “We can do it with a pilot and an observer in 15 minutes.
“It’s very accurate,” he added, noting that CTC measured with a drone, then sent in a survey crew to determine how well the results matched up.
“It was very, very close,” Moran said.
Wilson said he didn’t just purchase his drone for fire use.
“I wanted to buy something that I could use in all aspects – fire is only three, four months out of the year. I wanted something I could use personally for photos, videos. I’ve done some photos, videos. Stuff for school.”
But there’s no question it has been very useful in fighting fires.
Wilson said one instance he recalls where the drone was particularly helpful was the 2017 Trout Creek Fire in the Quartzville corridor.
“I put it up in the air and did recon. I saw the potential for it to spread fast, and go over the ridge. It allowed me to make the decision that we did need a helicopter; we needed more resources to stop it.
That was useful. My call for the chopper could have been delayed. The drone let me see that really fast.”
The fire started Sept. 7, 2017, following between 100 and 150 lightning strikes associated with a rainstorm that struck Linn County. Though most of the strikes had a lot of rain and hail fall on them, this one was about 10 miles west of the storm, a rogue lightning strike in an area that received no rain, fire officials said.
The fire was located on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property, on a hill about 2½ miles off Quartzville Road along Trout Creek Road.
Quick work by ODF Sweet Home Unit personnel, local landowners and a Weyerhaueser helicopter contained it to about half an acre.
Wilson said he got his drone into the air immediately after arriving at the scene.
“The fire doubled, almost tripled in size in the five minutes (the drone) was in the air,” he said. “It could have slopped off on the back side of a steep slope.”
He said it would have been significantly larger and harder to battle if it had gotten away, but realizing early that the helicopter was necessary was crucial.
“With fires, you never know,” Wilson said. “You err on the side of caution. We’re encouraged to call it early. If we can stop a fire at 2½ acres instead of 10 or 20 acres, that’s good.
“Pilot Wayne Hazard has saved our backsides so many times. I feel a little bit of calm when he’s in the air.”
He’s used the drone on some house fires, including some in Lebanon, he said.
“It gives them a visual. Sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s overkill.”
Last year Wilson was able to use the drone to help Sweet Home Fire & Ambulance District personnel locate some rafters, one of whom was reported injured, on the South Santiam River. Rescuers were having difficulty locating them.
“They couldn’t get a good description of where they were at,” Wilson said.
He was eventually able to spot them, close to Roberts Park, off Port Drive.
The drone provides perspectives that would have previously been impossible without a helicopter, he said. It’s cheap and it’s simple to fly.
“I charge the battery,” he said. “It has GPS coordination. I update the software once in a while. I can see a live-feed video on my cellphone.”
Moran said CTC’s latest drone has a built-in infrared – heat detecting – camera system, which makes it even more helpful in locating fire activity.
“We can look at the infrared and the live camera at the same time, we can look for hot spots, small fires that are just getting started. It works great at night when we can’t see after a lightning strike. We can work over a grid area, check everything out.”
CTC hasn’t actually used its drone for a fire yet, but the company’s pilots have been training with it over slash burns.
“It gives the operators a chance to get used to what they’ll see when they pick up a small fire,” Moran said.
Calderwood said ODF’s drone also has infrared capabilities. He said the agency has used handheld infrared cameras for years, and uses Google Earth mapping to detect smoke and fire locations as well.
“We look into any new technology that comes out,” he said. “Here’s a good example: When we get smoked in from bigger fires, we can use new technology to identify new starts, smaller fires that are just getting started. We use the same technology fire departments use when they go into houses to search for victims or hot spots. It helps us detect those hidden heats that we can’t detect visibly and mop them up 100%.”
Calderwood said last week that he’d used the drone the previous day on a Santiam Terrace fire.
“It was not to locate the fire,” he said. “It was just to get an aerial view.”
There are rules for drone use, one of which is that pilots must be FAA-certified. CTC has at least two such drone pilots, Moran said. ODF has a firefighter with certification.
“They’re trained and there’s requirements they have to follow,” Moran said.
According to the FAA, to operate a drone under the agency’s Unmanned Aircraft System rule, operators must obtain a Remote Pilot Certificate from the FAA. This certificate demonstrates that the pilot understands the regulations, operating requirements and procedures for safely flying drones, according to the agency.
Though his drone is capable of flying for miles, by law Wilson has to maintain visual sight of it, which limits its range to a few thousand feet. He said he’s been able to use a spotter occasionally, which allows for extended travel distance, but usually he’s glancing back and forth from the bird to the video on his cellphone.
He’s also careful not to fly if there’s aircraft in the area, because the two don’t mix. Firefighting agencies issue warnings asking drone operators not to operate in the areas of wildfires because FAA regulations do not allow planes to fly if drones are present, which can greatly limit firefighting capabilities.
“The rule is that if a drone is spotted, the aircraft have to shut down,” Wilson said, adding that he always checks airspace before launching.
But even with some limitations, it’s a bonus.
“It’s a different view of what you’re seeing,” Wilson said.
Moran said the drone may not look like much, but it delivers.
“It’s not a real fancy tool that doesn’t carry a lot of weight,” he said. “It’s a great tool.”