Thanks to John Githens for pointing us to this fascinating post from the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M about why they weren't allowed to fly emergency response drones at the recent Washington mud slides:
Just returned from the Oso, WA, mudslides with the Field Innovation Team (FIT) but didn’t fly due to drone privacy concerns from Snohomish county. The upside is that we now have a template for manned/unmanned airspace deconfliction and can assist others in getting emergency certificates of authorization (COAs ).
We had requests from the county to fly small UAVs first thing on Thursday but it was Friday morning before we had three assets on site: two fixed wings (the Insitu ScanEagle, Precision Hawk Lancaster) and one rotorcraft (our Air Robot 100B). All of these were provided through our Roboticists Without Borders program at no cost to the county, with Insitu and Precision Hawk diverting their teams led by Kevin Cole and Pat Lohman respectively from their current jobs.
The reason for UAVs was straightforward. Responders such as WA-TF1 and WA-TF4 working on the rescue and recovery are at great risk from even a small slide or flash flooding as the river is continuously changing and ponding as the rains continue. The site itself is gooey mud and workers would have to be evacuated by helicopters hoisting them out. The canyon is narrow with trees and thus it is hard to get complete imagery from manned assets to predict landslides or manage the flooding. Geologists are gently swarming the edges of the slides setting up sensors but there is still some visual information missing. The ScanEagle and smaller Precision Hawk are world class for geospatial reconstruction and flooding. FIT had arranged for post processing of the AirRobot quadrotor imagery with new 3D reconstruction software from Autodesk. Chief Steve Mason, West Division, talks about the potential for UAVs in this article. We also got a shout out in general.
We worked with the Engineering Branch to determine flight paths and payloads to monitor the river flooding and to get 3cm per pixel higher resolution scans of the lower slide, the cliff face where geologists where having to rope themselves off to take measurements, and the “moonscape” area of the slide currently inaccessible by foot and thus the response teams couldn’t plan how to access. The team went with the Engineering Branch out to the site to refine the missions, identify launch and recovery areas, and how to maintain constant line of sight. Insitu had to pull out on the first day because we couldn’t find a satisfactory launch and recovery space within the Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) area, which is airspace over the incident.
The need for the manned helicopters to fly at a moments notice for emergency evacuation combined with regular manned missions and the narrow canyon presented some challenges. Manned helicopters are extremely vulnerable when flying at low altitudes, and even a large bird can take them down, see the article about a near miss. That’s why a TFR is set up and it automatically bans any aircraft including UAVs operating under hobbyist rules. Everything has to be coordinated through the Air Branch of the incident.
The Air Branch instead of just saying “no” to UAVs did the opposite—they welcomed us and did a fantastic job of coordination, with Bill Quistorf helping us create a jargon-free airspace deconfliction plan that should work for just about any incident. Randy Willis and Mark Jordan at the FAA stayed on call through out the weekend working on the emergency COAs for each platform. Chief Harper gave us a room in the Oso Community Center next to the Oso Fire Station to stage in and we were touched by the generosity and community spirit of everyone we met.
However, as the Operations Branch put in the formal request for the finalized missions and we got ready to fly late on Saturday, Snohomish County Emergency Management in Everett stepped in and blocked the request. After discussions on Sunday, the new Incident Commander Larry Nickey cancelled the missions based on concerns about privacy. The families were already worried about the media leaking photos and some were very contentious about drones. It was at that point that I recalled that Washington state has some of the most restrictive drone anti-privacy laws in the country, so there is already distrust in general. There was no way for the Engineering Branch to determine without flying the UAVs if the data would be sufficiently better than what they were getting now and would significantly increase the safety of the responders to justify overruling the families. This just wasn’t the time to go into the chain of custody of the imagery or that these were no different than imagery than from the unmanned systems; the families in their grief can’t hear and the EOC personnel shouldn’t be distracted continuing to push for activities that make the families uncomfortable. Larry made the tough, but understandable, call to cancel the missions, but left the door open for flights after victim recovery was complete and the activity was cleanup and reopening the area.
This was the first outing of Roboticists Without Borders with FIT. FIT is lead by Desi Matel-Anderson, former Chief Innovation Advisor for FEMA, Rich Serino, former FEMA Deputy Administrator, and Tamara Palmer, former Program Specialist with FEMA’s Recovery Directorate, to help communities get innovations that they may not be aware of or know how to access. FIT staff worked to understand the needs of local officials and connect us with Autodesk. Frank Sanborn served as the FIT coordinator for us and he and Stacy Noland get big shout outs for helping with everything from lugging gear and driving 120 miles on Sunday between Everett, the EOC, and the site to try to get the mission request unstuck.
We are disappointed that we can’t help out but our hearts and prayers go out to the families and all of the fine people working this very, very tough event.
Comments
Exactly right Pedals,
Sadly it isn't at all unusual that even those in charge bow to emotional, media and political pressure.
People are intrinsically more emotional than logical and as Oliver said "drones" are an exceptionally emotional issue.
Also as Oliver said my Drones Are Fun site is based on the concept of trying to introduce people who may have little or no actual knowledge of what we do and why we do it to the positive and beneficial things we can do and to debunk much of the myth.
That's an important job and in the long run it will spell the difference in whether we can actually do some good or are simply buried in a social, media and political landslide of our own.
That is exactly what people who manage emergencies are supposed to do. Apply logic, not emotion.
John, your points are valid but the problem lies in trying to apply logic to emotional issues. Traffic cams, cell phones and, faceless social media data miners may all be pure poison but they are simply not scary on a chills-running-down-the-spine level. "Drones" are. And not just because of their ongoing military history, though that exacerbates the effect.
As Chicken Little and Alfred Hitchcock will tell us, most people just don't like things flitting about in the sky above them. Almost everything up there, for millions of years, has been bad news for folks on the ground, from lightning bolts and hail through rocks and arrows tossed by enemies to vampire bats, predatory birds, wasps and mosquitoes. Anything heard or seen as incoming from above triggers at least a tingle if not a shock of fear in most people. Mix that with the giant-insect sound of most drones and their generally spooky looks and that's enough to be seriously off-putting, even without tossing in a dose of political silliness such as the mostly spurious "privacy" issue. This is why I've heard grumbling about "drones" in our rural Post Office, right under the recently installed surveillance cameras.
This is also why simple reason only goes so far for us, and it's why just avoiding the name "drones" isn't enough. It's also why professional fear-mongers love every little drone screwup story.
Is there a solution? It's like trying to cure a fear of spiders or snakes, not the easiest thing to do especially on a large scale. I don't have an answer. Certainly a largely technical venue like this Web site isn't going to be very effective in creating a sea-change in visceral attitudes, although highlighting all of the wonderful peaceful uses of UAVs is of course valuable.
Maybe the sheer fun side of multicopters should be emphasized more heavily, with more push at getting people hooked on "toy" class quads, many of which are amazing and none of which are very threatening. Gary McCray's new DronesAreFun.com site has a lot of potential in that regard.
In any event, I feel like we're in a bit of a race, and that this matters. History tells us that when an emotional tipping point is reached bad things can happen to good ideas. We need to chip away at these primal issues surrounding UAVs, and not just brag on about all the great technology.
I think Stuart Brookes "hit the nail on the head." Why aren't folks as worried about helicopters or fixed-wing airplanes flying over and taking pictures with telephoto lenses? Why aren't they worried about meta-data amalgamation? Maybe because it's not as flashy a news story as "drones in the sky."
A lot of folks in my state (here in Washington) seem to worry about UAV overflights and privacy, but only in that "combination." Meanwhile, a major state software maker and others are building and fielding software systems that integrate street cameras, facial and license plate recognition software, cell phone tracking, and social media data mining into "crime situation awareness" systems called "Domain Awareness Centers." It's funded by The Department of Homeland Security. Granted, the two instances I know about are outside Washington State but I could see Homeland Security's interest in a system for Seattle and its port. Check it out at
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/21/280749781/in-...
http://cironline.org/reports/oakland-surveillance-center-progresses...
I asked my state representatives to address Domain Awareness Centers as a greater threat to our privacy than UAS. Why not go to the heart of the matter and address secret, blanket data collection from any and all sources, combined with data mining of social media and cell phone meta data, without probable cause or a warrant?
They responded with "thanks for the email. "
Why aren't they worried about people in manned aircraft taking pictures and leaking them?
It is an interesting development.
On the one hand it did sound like exactly how it should have been handled by everybody involved, right up to the point that political and personal considerations took over and actually interfered with the coordinated emergency efforts.
Usually it is the "drones" and their operators who are accused of illegally getting in the way of the authorized emergency procedures.
Here, it was quite clearly exactly the opposite.
In emergency circumstances with emergency authorities who are actually qualified to deal with these circumstances in charge it is unreasonable for them to be diverted by issues that provide no benefit to the outcome of their goals.
And issues of privacy with at risk people actually actively dying in front of you is no time - ever - to allow anyone else's personal concerns to hold sway.
They need to replace their emergency management leadership. And find a new leader that will manage the emergency, not coddle people who have no business even having an opinion on the matter. This is the same logic as someone saying a firetruck painted white is racist and therefore shouldn't be allowed to extinguish that burning house. Not at all surprising coming from Washington State, the liberal hippie HQ. If people could have been saved, but instead died as a result of their mis-management and coddling, they should be held accountable for it.
I was building a unit for camera man who works for a Seattle News station. He was on seen covering most of the incident. He informed me of the stand down as soon as it was issued. I like most who will read this was flabbergasted.
If I'm buried in mud, more dead than alive and with serious injuries...f privacy...find me, get me the f out of there, and do it now.
If I understand this correctly (and if it is accurate) the UAV deployment would have provided strategically and tactically valuable data during the course of an ongoing emergency, necessary data that was otherwise unobtainable or obtainable only by placing personnel in harms way.
With all due respect to civilians affected by this incident, since when is it part of any emergency service's protocols to base decisions concerning equipment and/or personnel deployment on "families' " concerns about anything at all, let alone about relative trivialities like possible leaked photos (sounds like someone is worried about their property values) or about their quasi-political opinions about "drones"? What's next, a fire department being ordered to pack up their hoses because they remind some neighbor's mother of snakes?
I'm commenting here as having been a fire/rescue first responder for 36 years and a fire chief (retired) for seven. IMHO, and again presuming that the above report is accurate, whoever made the decision to have this UAV resource stand down is unfit to be an IC and should probably find another line of work entirely. Any Fire Chief / IC with a pair of balls should have ignored interference and/or whining from any quarter (families, local politicians, bureaucrats, and in fact even the FAA) and should have invoked the enormous and extraordinary powers granted him during an emergency in most places in the US. That's how it's done, boys and girls, by real people who do what needs to be done and let the chips fall, instead of cowering behind alleged opinions and feelings of people who shouldn't even be anywhere near the process. It's laughable, embarrassing, and pathetic.