A new wildfire ignites during red-flag conditions at the height of fire season. Lightning strike, downed powerline, abandoned campfire — the cause doesn't matter. What matters is what happens in the next 20 minutes.
Now imagine that the local fire department is already stretched across other incidents, and that the aircraft that could stop this fire from growing are committed elsewhere.
That's not a hypothetical. That's the situation fire agencies face every major fire season. And it's exactly what Seneca was built for.
This exact situation is what Seneca founder Stuart Landesberg is hoping to address with the company’s new autonomous, rapid response drone system.
Designed for high-risk and low-resource situations, this drone system was made to significantly bolster firefighters’ initial attack capabilities on wildfires, requiring only one to two people to deploy.
“If we were up on a ridgeline on a high fire risk day, the fact that you could run this with one or two people for 30 or 40 minutes rather than having to send a full team up into the brush for many hours, that could be the difference between having folks available for a structure fire, for another incident that needs attention,” Landesberg said.
Recently, Bill Clerico spent a day in the field with Seneca, testing the system and exploring how autonomous drones could become an essential tool in the firefighting toolkit as catastrophic wildfire risk increases in communities across the West.
Watch our episode with Seneca on YouTube. https://lnkd.in/gYvXG9eB