The Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management collaborated with Texas A&M’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue to use drones to survey floods and to assist in search and rescue operations during tropical storm Harvey. “The drones [help us] to really get into areas that we can’t get into in order to see the extent of the flood for decision support back in the operations center,” said Lach Mullen, Fort Bend OEM emergency public information system administrator.   The county’s office of emergency management has used drones in an information-gathering role, mapping out the flooded region and the topography, Mullen said. Currently, it has about fifteen drones in use, Mullen said. “We’ve been flying them over the inundated areas to get first a view from above for decision support, but also we flew them over areas where the water level is high in a grid pattern in order to stitch the imagery together later in order to create 3D models of the flooded areas,” Mullen said. The technology was loaned to Fort Bend County at no charge by CRASAR’s Roboticists Without Borders program, CRASAR director Robin Murphy said. Although the county owns a few drones, only CRASAR drones are being used, Mullen said. They are controlled by CRASAR personnel while Fort Bend officials assess the affected areas, he said. The Fort Bend OEM has used the drones to identify neighborhoods cut off by flooding and to find passable travel routes, as well as to estimate how many people are trapped in the neighborhood, to look at infrastructure damage, and to verify models of flood predictions, Murphy said. CRASAR assisted Fort Bend OEM during the 2015 and 2016 floods, Mullen said. “Previously, without the drones, we would have to fly traditional aircrafts over disaster areas in order to capture imagery,” Mullen said. “And usually when we would fly the traditional aircrafts we could take a lot of photos from a person being in the aircraft but they weren’t georeferenced...the photos would come back into the emergency operations center and we wouldn’t necessarily know what it was a picture of or where it was taken or what direction it was facing. It was very difficult to process those images into something meaningful.” With drones, officials knew exactly what they were looking at because the data was stored with the images, Mullen said. Drones also help to minimizes the risk to personnel, he said. “We also have problems flying aircrafts in inclement weather conditions,” Mullen said. “It’s very scary to put three people on a helicopter when it’s windy and rainy because, of course, you always worry about the helicopter having problems.” The drones allowed officials to make decisions faster and more efficiently, he said. “The images and the data that we have from the drones in the last three years and from [Harvey] has been invaluable, more or less impossible to put a price on,” Mullen said. The county is using 10 models of these drones of varying sizes during this emergency period, Murphy said. Some of the drones are powered by batteries, and because those only last about 40 minutes, they are used for short-term flights, looking at one specific area, Mullen said. Other drones are gas fueled and can be in flight for 12 hours, he said. Those are used to examine a wider region of the county. The city of Houston neither owns nor uses drones during its rescues, city of Houston spokesman Kese Smith said. However, the American Red Cross may deploy drones in the recovery and assessment phase, Smith said. Civilians are prohibited from operating drones in emergency areas. The Federal Aviation Administration has issued the following warning: “The FAA warns unauthorized drone operators that they may be subject to significant fines if they interfere with emergency response operations. Flying a drone without authorization in or near the disaster area may violate federal, state, or local laws and ordinances, even if a Temporary Flight Restriction is not in place. Allow first responders to save lives and property without interference.”     So far, the Fort Bend OEM has not had any clashes with civilian-operated drones, Mullen said. “The temporary flight restriction the FAA has in place has been really helpful in keeping some folks away from where we’re flying,” he said.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXIHyQ5jt0