Hurricane Milton Response - HazMat Ops, Damage Assessment, and Recovery Strategy

In this live discussion, Rich is joined by Bryan King, a Solutions Engineer at Skydio. Together, they’ll walk through critical response scenarios like the one above and discuss their approach to assisting the communities impacted by Hurricane Milton.

This session covers:

• Neutralizing ignition risks: How teams prevented potential fire and explosion hazards caused by flammable vapor releases.
• Situational awareness without exposure: Relieving on remote assessments is the new standard to make informed decisions without exposing personnel to unnecessary danger, even in unstable or toxic environments.
• Seamless interagency communication: Understand how teams used live-streamed aerial views to coordinate communication with precision in real-time.
• Reduced impact on the community: Essential gasoline supplies were made available within hours, keeping relief efforts on track and the community stable during the crisis.

Join Rich and Bryan, seasoned professionals with over 40+ years of experience in public safety and emergency response to get answers to questions from the front lines.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Morning to some of y'all.

I'm Bryan King, and this is going to be a, fun webinar live, in person, station two in, Southern Manatee.

I'm here with Rich Gatanis, and we're gonna do, webinar on the response of Hurricane Milton.

You know, we're gonna take questions in the chat. Again, this is a different kind of webinar, so bear with us. As you can see behind me, the rigs, if they have to go, they have to go. So please, don't get too bothered if you start hearing sounds and stuff going on. But, thanks for coming today, and we look forward to having a good time.

Thanks for having me, Bryan. Yeah. Luckily, I'm not on the truck, so, we don't have the world of me jumping away. So I'll still be here with you if the truck falls, but that'll be good. Nice.

So like I said, it's gonna be a little bit different webinar, so you're gonna hear a lot of back and forth, almost almost like a podcast type event, but we're gonna be able to try to keep, keep up with the topic. And if we go off the topic, we go off the topic. Right? So a little background on myself. I'm Bryan King, Solutions Engineer with Skydio.

Been in the public safety drone space for about seven years now.

Love working with first responders, love working with drone technology, and, I'm really happy to be here. On to you, Rich.

Thanks. Yeah. Again, Rich Gatanis, with Southern Manatee Fire Rescue. For those of you who don't know Manatee County, we're just a little south of Tampa on the west coast of Florida.

I've been on a job as a firefighter for 21 years. I'm a HazMat Technician here, and I also get the pleasure of kinda running or, you know, managing our UAS team here.

So we're looking forward to it. A little, little, fireside chat style. Just kinda just talk about the, the hurricane response.

So, a little bit little bit more background about Southern Manatee.

Manatee County is kinda weird. We have nine independently taxing fire districts within Manatee County. So there's a bunch of different fire departments, but there's only one HazMat team, and the HazMat team is with Southern Manatee.

So we, you know, have a a small 36-square mile section that Southern Manatee covers for typical fire emergency response, ALS or paramedic response. But our HazMat team is responsible for the entire county as well as tri county area. So we we we have mutual agreements with Sarasota, Hillsborough County, and DeSoto. DeSoto County up here. Right? DeSoto County. We we have about 83 line personnel currently on on the job at Southern Manatee.

Manatee County's got about 430,000 residents. Like I said, nine nine pilots because we run two guys every shift, or we have at least two pilots available. We try to have them available every shift.

But, yeah, some of the some of the, stats you can see there. The big one for us, I would say, would be HazMat.

When, specifically, we talked about the the rig because our HazMat truck, we run about two hundred calls a year for HazMat.

The, I don't know. It has to be at least three years ago.

Rich invited us over to do their region six training event. No. No. It was different.

It's a Tropicana. Tropicana drill. Yeah.

Tropicana drill. And I was just, like, blown away at what potentially could happen with that facility. Not that it's saying it's going to happen or it has happened, but these guys are preparing for, you know, protecting the community and getting into the root cause of what happened. I don't know if you wanna just touch on that real quick.

Yeah. We know. That's a good point. So so Tropicana, everybody drinks Tropicana orange juice. It's manufactured right here in Brandon, Florida.

Uses, refrigerants to keep their, juice cold, and one of them is, well, it's called anhydrous ammonia. And for those of you that know what that is, it's pretty dangerous stuff.

Anhydrous, and the volume that they have at, at Tropicana can be extremely dangerous to our our community if something were to happen there. So we do regular drills with them. Matter of fact, we're we're first due response right they're right down the street from us here. So, So, you know, when we had Bryan and and Chris and Skydio team out here a few years ago, the purpose was to, like, better understand Skydio and how those drones could kinda help us in the way that we're responding.

And it's been so far, it's been pretty pretty exciting. We've been been able to deploy these in some pretty interesting scenarios.

Yeah. A lot was learned a lot was learned there.

So, yeah, so as we're gonna go through this, we'll he'll talk about a lot of HazMat situations, and I think it's important for all of us to really understand, you know, what is HazMat, what HazMat does. I mean, he talks a lot about it now, but, like, the granular stuff of dealing with chemicals, dealing with, you know, whatever the case may be.

If you just wanna just hit that a little bit.

So, yeah, there's typical fire response is, is not what you know, when you when you think about fire, you don't think about HazMat, so to speak, as quite as much because HazMat comes out.

Somebody else is paying the bill for that. That's not a taxpayer funded kinda, like, response. Right? If you if you break a leg or something, fire shows up, that's what you do with tax. HazMat, somebody's somebody's on the on the ticket. Somebody did something wrong or just still somebody's responsible for it. So we gotta go there and help kinda mitigate that, clean up those stuff.

We do have a ton of, like, chemical or, you know, industrial areas here, the Manatee County too. So we keep pretty busy and and, you know, we've been able to develop some different tactics where I would say drones were were were deploying those almost all of our HazMat scenes. If it's outside just because it just gives you another piece of that puzzle.

I've I've heard your leadership say how important drones are. Yeah. And that video feed helps them make decisions.

I've seen you guys deploy it off a truck, during a training exercise, but you guys are by the numbers, and it's it's it's pretty impressive.

So go to the next slide, please.

So yeah. Yeah. So FLOGRU, this is, kinda one near and dear to my heart. And, actually, I would say, Bryan, you, you've been a big part of in the early stages of FLOGRU.

FLOGRU is, the Florida public safety UAS coordination group, and that was developed I like to say remember FUBU, for us by us. Right? Public safety folks in in the state of Florida, you know, after legislation changed and we had to change the type of drones we were using, it was important that we all collectively got together and and started to develop a way to be a, more prominent voice at state level, as well as communicating, you know, energetically with other communicating, you know, inter-jurisdictionally with other agencies. So now I know a lot of the agencies that are with FLOGRU, we do a lot of the same types of trainings.

We have the same equipment, using the same policies. So when we work together in training and and and options and or training and stuff through FLOGRU, it builds that, stakeholder relationship with some of these other agencies that I I may end up on a call with one day. So especially with the amount of hurricanes that we have, you know, good segue there. But, we're always working with other agencies.

So FLOGRU was developed specifically for that, to be for us, by us. It's all led by public safety folks. And we got a great team, drone responders. It's kinda like the overarch, umbrella that kinda help us put this thing together.

But, numbers wise, I wanna say we probably have we have over 400 members, probably at least 120-130 agencies represented with FLOGRU just in the state of Florida. So really excited to be a part of it. And some of the photos there, you can see some of the disaster response to it.

Yeah. It was it was fun hearing about it at the beginning, from sergeant Julia, Florida Highway Patrol and from Rich, and a couple others. They really were just trying to create relationships, really. Because there was a legislation, but there's also drones still involved, and you want you guys wanted to you guys wanna interact with not just the big agencies.

You know? You wanted to just Palm Beach Sheriff's Office or Hillsborough County. You wanted to talk to Ocala. You wanna talk to smaller towns smaller counties, and you really wanted to make sure that they had the education, potentially the documents, all that stuff so they their their program can flourish.

And, not for nothing, but I see a lot of a lot of agencies that maybe didn't have a flourishing program. They're flourishing today. Even with the legislation, they're flourishing today because of the teamwork that you guys have put together.

Yeah. And and I'll I'll add on to that too. So one of the the interesting things that I think drone tech has been able to do for for public safety, like, you know, rewind a few years ago, late law enforcement fire, most, agencies didn't talk to each other. Right? There was a system I I'm gonna do my thing and do drone seems to be the piece that has allowed us to, like, bridge that gap some to some extent.

More often than not.

Yeah. So I can you know, we'll do a joint training with the sheriff's office or we'll, invite in. Like, we had Dooley come out. He's highly patrolled. He put on a class about, you know, drone laws and legislation or let's say, put the drone laws in the state of Florida, which still pertains to us. I'm still a first responder. Maybe not quite as important as it is on the law enforcement side, but it's that great equalizer, brings everybody together, to where we can start working across the table and and supporting them with with their needs, and they can support us with ours.

Absolutely. Hundred percent. I think it's it's a great group, and they've done a really, really good job. They do this on their on the side too. They don't they're not, at on working hours, you know, doing this. They're doing this when they get home after their shift. So it's, kudos to the to the team at, at FLOGRU for sure.

And a little shameless plug, we got FLOCON coming next year.

Our three day, Best drone show of the training, all for public safety.

If you're interested in it, go to FLOGRU or droneresponders dot org, and you'll find all that information. It's a great, great training, conference. Yeah.

So Hurricane Milton, came into Florida as a category three. 120 mile per hour winds, 20 per feet out fatalities, 85 billion in damages. I think from the ground, I should say, from a Floridian's perspective, we saw a lot of, it was a different storm. It was big. It was wide. I'm all the way down in Palm Beach County, and I felt the effects.

And it it didn't I think ground zero was, like, north of Tampa, or is it? Yeah.

Milton, it was actually just south of Manatee. So Sarasota got took they took the island. We got the north side of the storm, which is where all the winds are. And you guys had I mean, I've noticed so many tornadoes in my life, and that was way off of that.

One of those big, like, dumpsters were throwing up something on top of the house.

It was it was it was a very unique storm in the sense that there's a lot of different things going on. It was a lot of happening all over the state because it it was so big.

And so, you know, there was there was some things that happened, especially, in Saint Petersburg, and we're gonna touch on a bunch of these here in in in on the next slide, if you wanna touch a little bit more on how you guys get activated, how things happen when a storm comes. Do you come here and you bunker down? How tell me, like, when it when when the storms come in, how do you guys prepare, and what do you do once it comes?

Yeah. So, you know, and I'll even add this. Interestingly enough, this was a pretty, abnormal year for Floridians. Like, we we always have the threat of hurricanes.

For those of you that are from here, it's a it's a pretty common thing. But, this one was we had three kind of back to back storms, and and hurricanes come in two different varieties of what we like to call them. We got flood events and we have wind events. And and right before Milton hit, we had, was it Eileen or, Helene.

Helene. Helene came in, and we had a massive, rain and flood event. And so this is less than three weeks, I think, three or four weeks later, Milton hit. So we were still reeling from, Helene when Milton came in.

And, you know, we've been pretty lucky, at least in our in Manatee County, of dodging hurricanes. It seems to always go around us, but this time, we took probably the biggest hit we've had in a hundred years here. And, it did quite a bit of damage. But to your more to your question, it is a very routine thing here for us.

We know hurricanes are coming. They start standing guys up. They'll, they'll have us show up to stations at least sometimes twelve, twenty four hours ahead of the storm.

And then we have all the supplies and resources, everything we have here. One thing I would I would keep in mind, especially for those in Florida, they don't realize it. You know, fire emergency services, that we do have a go no go time too. I I think a lot of people aren't aware of that.

And if if a whole storm's threatening and then we get above a certain wind speeds or certain flooding, fire, emergency management or, EMS, police, they're not gonna be responding.

So that's why it's important when we tell you guys to leave, tell you to evacuate, make sure. Yeah. You're you're following those those because, you know, we it's not to say we don't wanna go out there, but we have rules here too that they don't wanna the truck's stuck in, you know, six feet of water. It's not gonna do anybody in it here. So just remember that at 55 mile an hour winds, our agency shuts down, and I think that's pretty common with most agencies.

There was a, hurricane, in was it two thousand twenty was it twenty two?

Yeah.

Twenty two, twenty three.

Five or something. Yeah. Either way.

So that one came was coming ashore, and it was heading north closer to Tampa, and I was on Sanibel Island for a conference. I was just over there for the day, and, there were people there that were like, oh, it's going north. We're good. These are some of these are out of towners.

Some of these are local people. But we're fine. We're fine. We're fine. We were literally standing on Sanibel Island where about, you know, four days later, there was no bridge to get back across the island.

So it was like, oh, it's going north. One of the people here told me that we'll be fine if we stay here.

It's just it's just you just listen to your, you know, authorities and and people in town and, know what's going on, and then they'll they'll guide you in the right direction. We actually got a question in. And I probably I might butcher this a little bit. Rich, are many of the industrial fire brigades HAZWOPER?

HAZ, h a z w HAZWOPER. Yeah. Teams in your area also using UAS question. And then if so, how do you coordinate with them to deconflict airspace during a response?

No. That is a good question.

So yes and no. Honestly, the hazmat industry hasn't seen a huge explosion of of UAS or robotics for that matter.

One and if any of you that are familiar with the fire service, our our funding streams are a little different than a lot. Like, so law enforcement, for example, they can use confiscated or or seizures seizure funds that they get to to support their special operations teams.

Stuff like, HazMat, tech rescue, a lot of those are funded from the agency itself. So it's coming out of that general budget that's we gotta take it out of a slice of pie. So finding the money to to support that is kinda challenging in a lot of agencies, especially the smaller ones.

But I will say because, again, we started our program back in about twenty sixteen. And since that point, we I get calls regularly now from agencies that are hazmat, and they're like, hey. We got some good funding streams for hazmat from port security or or, DOT kinda, ways to get funding. Can we wanna start a team for our pro or HazMat team?

So those numbers are coming up. But to answer your question more specifically, immediately right around us right now, we do have, Pinellas County. Saint Pete has they are running UAS, but we don't work with them all that often. But they they are starting to spool up.

And for deconfliction, obviously, if if we go on scene and I know that the my my counterpart is also operating some sort of unmanned system, then we're gonna have to work together on that.

I would say our biggest deconfliction actually comes with, like, when we have coast guard involved. Yeah.

Or or law enforcement with their their man aviation. So all these things kinda, like, are are things we gotta worry about and and think about. But, so far, we've you know, it's been event free, and, you know, we've been pretty smooth for it.

And I hate to I hate to talk about and I don't hate about it, but, again, FLOGRU, that group now reacting to hurricanes is like a text away, a phone call away. Hey. We're gonna be in the area. What do you guys how are you guys operating?

It's it's seamless. I know, Dave Merrick up at Florida State University, he kinda, like, was kinda one of the first ones that were going into those areas. And now you have all these other guys that are coordinating with them, coordinating with Southern Manatee, coordinating with all these people, and it's it's I don't wanna call it seamless. It's challenging.

You still have a lot to do. You have TFRs in place. You gotta put in SGIs. You have all to do all of that.

But the group effort has really, really made a difference.

Yeah. And I'll just have one more thing too is being able to make a phone call like Brian mentioned. And, you know, we had a presidential TFR in place for, matter of fact, for Hilton or for Milton. And, you know, I didn't I haven't worked very many presidential TFRs.

Most of the stuff is away from us. So I make a quick phone call to, sergeant Dooley, Ohio Patrol. Boom. Boom.

Boom. He walks me through it. He gives me the, you know, tells me who I need to contact and and, obviously, we went through SGI for all that.

But, again, those those contacts, those people that you you get to know in in a group like FLOGRU Yep.

Pay off dividends when you when you really need somebody.

For sure. For sure.

So we'll move on here. Any more questions, please put them in the chat. We'll be sure to answer them.

So what we're looking at here is a, a building that had some issues, obviously, during the, the hurricane. There was a crane that was doing construction on a building across the street from this one.

Where was this at?

This was in downtown Saint Pete.

Downtown Saint Pete.

Yeah. So downtown Saint Pete, working with, Saint Petersburg PD. We Skydio was in town to support any agencies, and we said, Hey, do you need us to map that out?

So myself and another, Skydian went there. In about forty minutes, we had about fifteen hundred images. We took them back, processed them, and a couple different, tools, but, we were able to get this to them and, show them, you know, from a perspective like, they had the construction crews are starting to clean up. We were there, and they were starting to bring stuff in, so we captured this data just in time, before it went out.

We also did Tropicana Stadium and some other things there for the mapping tools that the, the Skydio drone, the X10, has, with its optics. And, so this is the type of stuff that, I know we're gonna see here in a little bit. Rich used 2D. I used, 3D modeling here, and it all just creates just a huge bunch of data points you can use for during the event, if you can get it processed, or post event.

Just out of curiosity, was does this say 3D scan, a tower? How did you do that?

Because it's the the type of building Yeah.

No. It was it was actually, it was a 3D scan.

And because of the structure of the building, I was able to do a lot of it was able to get into a lot of different crevices and not have to do, like, around, you know, an orbit per se.

I mean, it was going in between the building and the and the Sure. And the crane there. There was a lot of a lot of really interesting, viewpoints of that. And we actually couldn't go into the site because at that point, the construction team shut it off, so they allowed us to fly.

We were probably about 300 feet away and still able to send the drone in. They were completely fine with that to to do the modeling. And then we took it. We brought again, processed it in, I think, in Gnext and in Bentley, to be able to give us some models that the town the city could use, just for historical value, for investigational value, so on and so forth, insurance, stuff like that.

And and I would say too, like, you know, just from a the fire perspective too, you know, I I've talked to a lot of friends who ran some pretty, amazing, structural collapses and stuff over the last year or so, notably in Ohio and New York.

And they were doing 3D modeling too to better understand the the the location they were at. Matter of fact, down at Surfside, I think that you guys were there were scans going on constantly to see the different layers and see what pieces and parts were there.

But, this this is a tool that I think is is undervalued, especially in, in, like, you know, rapid response. Yeah. Because we have a tendency to wanna, like, quickly throw the drone up and get cool, good good bird's eye view. But these these scenes are, are constantly changing and being able to, rapidly pull something together, a map like that. And I don't know how long your that took to to scan that, but if it was a two d ortho, I mean Yeah. I think ours would take thirty five minutes from that point.

So Yeah.

Even that, that time we did the region six where we went to the water treatment plant, I was able to do a two d map, and it was like we had it in, like, twenty five minutes.

You're able to make decisions off of that right here on the spot.

So So apologize for the chainsaw, whatever's going on in the background there.

It's live. It's live. It's live. Next slide, please?

So, yeah, I'll I'll jump in here. This is kind of the meat and potatoes what we were, we're talking about with the, case study with the Hurricane Milton had had started to make landfall here. Now at a typical, response, the the counties and and and whatnot will tend to, like, get, get materials, get fuel, get all that stored ahead of time, get it ready to go.

And so that's what the they did. They have this stored at our our port, to be able to be ready to go.

As soon as the storm passes, now we get all those, resources out to the to the the people who need it.

And fuel is a big one. Right? So our our boat was ready to go. Storm had rolled through, and, there was an accident that had taken place at the, sorry.

We're gonna try to make it a little quieter in here for you.

Anyways, so, once we, the storm had passed, you know, I'll I'll let they're gonna play a video here in a second, kinda explain a little more. But, just some of the the things that we were able to accomplish to kinda help get that fuel moving. Because when the fuel's not moving, people aren't, you know, they're not heat they're not cooling their homes. They're not their food's, you know, rotting away. So, but, yeah, if you wanna play that video, we could probably play that into that.

They're cutting trees Hurricane Milton had rolled through, and we took almost a direct hit.

These particular fuel silos, there's a floating roof on it. During the storm, this floating roof got damaged. Now, the roof started to slowly seep into the gasoline, exposing gasoline on top of it.

The problem was vapor cloud that was being produced was creating VOCs which are your volatile organic compounds. So the VOCs are high.

The flammable limits were high.

You had to be, we couldn't go in there.

Our command post had to be way far away.

Getting the fuel out wasn't happening.

The first thing we did was surveillance, get a good understanding of the size of the facility.

The scouting team came in and they helped me scan the area in that creates some good imagery where we can do some, some like volume metrics. We were able to compute a lot of that stuff to be able to measure, volumes measure vapor space measure, you know, all that good stuff.

Day two was where we worked the crew in and out of the scene based on the wind changes. The vapor clouds moving when it moved away from the, the workers, we could get in their work. We could turn wrenches, do all that because the vapors didn't know where you need to hear them now. If the vapor cloud switched and they got overwhelmed, they had to back out. That was that was basically the plan that we developed to make this all work.

My command post, our HazMat truck is set up with TV monitors. We have it built right in the truck. Now everybody gets to kind of see what's what's going on in real time operationally. So that's one of the beautiful things about the live view is we can all stand around and monitor, see what's going on in real time, and we can talk collectively and come up with a plan in real time.

But the folks that wanted to see it outside of that, we had that ready link available. We could send the, the link to the governor's office. All the stakeholders in Tallahassee are watching it. It changes the dynamics of how you respond, what you're willing to do because you have so much more information.

Those are the the main core pieces of what we're able to, to gain from the scene using our drones.

So, again, I'm gonna apologize.

Apparently, it's wood chipper day out in front of the station.

Oh, good. They've only turned that on.

On. Alright. Oh, it's gonna do some anyways. Alright. So let's get back to, to the floating roof deck.

So, what ends up happening and just so people kinda understand how a lot of these giant fuel silos work. When you fill a liquid underneath there, a flammable liquid, you know, you want that roof to be able to rise and fall with it. And the reason why is because that vapor space, if you get that's what burns. The liquid doesn't burn, gases burn.

So that gas that will not allow that to form as long as there's a floating roof on it. So when they started to flow fill the tank up with, gasoline to the tune of four million gallons, the, storm had damaged the roof, and it slowly started to sink into the product.

So you you you saw that silo. You saw that, container.

It is orange, and you're probably wondering When when did they realize the roof had fallen?

So okay. Yeah. So the night, I've been curious about that. So the night that the storm had after it passed, they had realized it was damaged, but it was slowly sinking into it. So it's not like it was, like, boom. It went right down. So for the next day or two, they were trying to figure out how they can fix it, stop it, how to get the products off.

At what point did they call you guys?

So we we showed up on day three.

Okay.

Day three, we were there. And the reason why they even showed we showed up is, obviously, there's not much we can do with that much gasoline. Right. But what we our job is to do air monitoring. So we're trying to support their resources.

So their their guys can't even get into that scene because and you probably saw that vapor cloud and that stuff.

If you ever spilled gasoline on your driveway or you're trying to do the weird, you smell how strong that gasoline is. Right? And that's, you know, a couple ounces of splash. This is 4 million gallons exposed.

So just imagine what that smelled like, how much gas that was. So tremendously high level of, flammability when you got to the right right places. The VOCs, which are those volatile organic compounds, extremely high. And so the contractors that come there to offload the fuel, by their own rules and and standards, they can't even get into there because the levels are too high.

So our job was to work with them to, air monitor when the air would switch, would move a direction. We got you guys could get some work done in there. When we saw started to see changes, we backed them back out.

But being able to have all these different types of air monitoring equipment Yeah. Was a was a big piece of that.

For sure. Sure. No. I was watching this from afar. I was up in Pasco County and, just, like, you know, he touched on the video there of using the ReadyLink and the cellular connectivity, to be able to do this.

Now sometimes you get into a hurricane post event and, you don't have cellular. So we understand that, and and it's and there's other devices you could use, like a live view to get the connection out, whatever the case may be. But in reality, we we had cellular just like we did up in, Hernando County and Pasco County where there's a lot of flooding. There was a lot of people, you know, water rescues going on.

Tampa, Hillsborough County, a lot of west rescues water rescues going on. And they had the ability to fly the drone seamlessly with a video coming off of the drone, which, to me has been amazing.

I'm a I work with Skydio, so I'm saying this, but in reality, I'm sure they can some of these guys can attest to it. The the video that's coming off the drone is just has been clear as day, and you can send it to immediately send it to 40, 50 , 60 people, and you're able to get that data to them in in real time.

Yeah. Yeah. I I would say I agree that, you know, one of the things that when we went to Skydio, being able to have that capability to the livestream, which we didn't have it before. And, you know, there's obviously third party stuff that we could have gone to, but the being able to integrate it seamlessly because it's Skydio's, you know, OEM streaming platform.

Well, the X10 with the, SIM, you know, flying over cellular was was a huge difference. I made a a major difference in one connectivity, and then two, the live stream. You no longer had to make sure my controller was getting good connection to it. So, and we've had this couple times where we had it was very important that our live stream went to folks at in Tallahassee.

This was this was one of them. And then our, overturned rail car that we had, governor's office wanted wanted a video of that too. So the live streaming is definitely a big big piece of that. Yeah.

You want me to to kinda jump in on these Yeah.

Go ahead.

For you. So, excuse me. So interesting thing too. Like, we we talked about mapping a little bit a little while ago.

And rapid mapping is a very useful tool in in in what we're doing, especially with I would say pass that. We can create there's large scenes typically, and we can start to see progression of that scene if you have some some rapid mapping capabilities. So for example, we have PIX 4D React that comes on a truck.

Yep.

I can quickly bring the information in.

We have a laptop dedicated to to doing PIX, and that allows us to put some really high definition orthos quickly. And I could do it multiple times if I needed to. So but that lets us build up that action plan in the beginning so everybody's on the same plan. We could see what's going on.

You see the before and the after with Google images. Well, to take it up a notch, even because Skye or, excuse me, PIX 4D is a is a stand alone on our on our laptop. Then, Skydio showed up, and they you guys brought GeneX out with you. And so this is a cloud based, modeling program.

And, you know, there's there's wins and losses on both sides. Obviously, you gotta be able to connect to the Internet to be able to push your imagery. Takes a little longer when you're trying to do, over the network or something like that. But just by you know, even though we're showing you three d models here, three d images, this was not three d capture in the sense that your tower was.

Right? This is just a two d down map. But the the camera in the the aircraft is good enough to build this thing out so that we can actually, through G Next software, turn this into, a 3D image.

And why that's important for us, and this is this is as I think as good of an example as you can get.

Even though we already kinda knew how much fuel was in that, we we were able to confirm those levels of fuel just by using a three d map and then doing some, you know, volumetrics. Getting in there, dropping some pins, it can measure it out for us.

It does all the work, and then you just What height were you after that?

I don't see don't remember.

I wanna say about Fifty three hundred probably?

No. No. Actually, I think it was less than that. I would say there Okay. Well, probably below it was below too much.

How did you make your decisions? I mean, I don't agree. I'm not a chemist, so I don't understand. Like, how did you make your decisions to give it a fly? Whatever height you did due to the the the chemicals or whatever, you knew you were gonna be safe. Did you did you how did you determine that?

Yeah. Well, you know, it's half that. There's never, like, a an easy answer to any of that. You're always at a potential risk. Yeah. But the the the the big three, like, I always tell everybody is make sure you do your air space, your altitude set, your return to home, and your emergency gauges are always set. That way, when that thing does go something goes wrong, it's gonna go into what you told it to do.

And so those are all great points because, last thing you wanna do is have an aircraft go down in ten million gallons of Of course.

Of gasoline. So sorry to interrupt. No. No. It's fine.

But, maybe trucks are moving here in a second. So but, yeah.

So being able to get those measurements and and also we wanna make sure our distances are safe from the from the command post, you know, and hazards in the hot or cold zones.

And then, yeah, volumes, being able to, like, measure the container, the radius, the height. Yep.

And, you know, once that model was produced once that model was produced, they're, they were able to, like, give us that model, and now we can do all the the math and and whatnot with it. I apologize, guys. These guys are getting ready to pop smoke.

Might need to close the anyways, so where we at?

Yeah. So just a couple of questions in here.

How long did it take to create it?

How long did it process it?

I think I think that's a pretty standard question, you know, when it comes to the mapping, especially with the x ten. If you're at hundred fifty twenty, you're gonna be, you know, you're gonna be doing that. I don't know. What's that? Like, three or four acres, maybe five acres? Yeah.

It was a good Yeah.

So you're probably doing that in about ten minutes, maybe twelve minutes of flight time.

It was under twenty minutes.

Yeah.

Whatever that was. Yeah. Under twenty minutes. And then processing time, depending on what you use, if you wanna go local, if you wanna go cloud, there's a bunch of different there. What you do have, if that was do you remember how many images? It was like, five three, five? Yeah.

It was somewhere around there. Four hundred or something.

So four hundred images on the X10 control.

You can actually process the bottom right there.

We've got wood chippers. We've got chainsaws.

We now have a headband truck rolling out. So we're, you know, doing this live. So, know, doing this live.

So, you know, we're gonna have to bar the horse.

So, yeah. So you're doing this on the s control. You can actually see a stiff model, and probably about fifteen minutes after that. So in call it thirty five minutes, you could be on scene, see a stitch model, and then process it in G Next or PIX 4D or whatever you decide to use to give you that, ability to get the volumetric measurements and and whatnot.

Yeah. And just understand if you're doing anything cloud based, you are totally reliant on your network connection. So, and and not just that's not good, bad, or different. Just know that if you're in a in a deprived environment, such as hurricane disaster areas, a lot of times you're not gonna get cellular up there.

So just just know that. It's kinda why we went to, the PIX 4D as a standalone rapid mapping software, so we could it it's gonna gonna crunch it on the truck. It's already gonna be it'll be there right rapidly. I don't I don't need connectivity to it.

So And then, I mean, I'm not I don't know exactly, but I would say most serious hazmat scenarios.

You're on scene for a while.

Yes.

You're on scene for a while to where the the aerial intelligence is giving you information. You're able to get the data, you know, get the data to a processing tool. And most likely, you're probably still on scene when that's processed, and you can even start making more decisions.

Yeah. So and you see the scale of this this facility. And so when our guy when our team was working in there, it was important that we had a aerial view of them at all times. And this is where, you know, our our previous, methods of, you know, just kinda on a hope and a prayer, whether you guys are walking behind that container, and we don't we we only got radio comms with them.

But being able to watch them the whole time, one, from a safety perspective is invaluable. You can't you can't put a price tag on that. Being able to see hazards, trip hazards before your guys even get there. So this is a huge huge very long distance away.

I wanna say we were probably five, six hundred feet away, seven hundred feet. And, there was tons of, piping and and everything imaginable. There's storm damage was as you can see, a lot of these structures are already still destroyed in there. So having that ISR or that surveillance on your on your guys, it was a valuable piece.

So this is this is the the one question that, may or may not have an answer, but I I I feel like it needs to be asked especially with this conversation.

And I'm gonna butcher the word interest in Intrinsically safe.

Intrinsically safe. Yeah.

Talk to me about that, and talk to me about the entire UAS world on how you you or maybe a manufacturer what do you do if a manufacturer comes out and says, yes, we are versus no, we aren't? What what do you put the drone through to make sure that when you send a drone out or whatever the case may be, just give me, like, a background on it.

Yep. No. That's always a good question, especially with HAZMAT.

Intrinsic value is important, especially with all the meters stuff that we use.

But, you know, drones specifically, are not intrinsically safe inherently. They have too many exposed, motors and wires, so there's really no manufacturer, at least not yet. We'll probably see something like that come down the pipe soon. But right now, nobody that's really a truly intrinsically safe drone for obvious reasons.

Now for Southern Manatee, though, in order for us to use these for our hazmat response, it was important that we understood the limitations of our of our of our equipment. And one of those is, hey. You know, dealing with hazmat, you could potentially end up inside of flammable atmospheres. For example, that that, container, that silo.

So it was important that we tested these systems against some of these really nasty types of flammable gases.

So that's kinda what we did Southern Manatee, we decided to do our own in house testing, which became a little bit of a big hit. People liked it because we were blowing drones up.

See one in a while.

Yeah. Yeah. We're ready. It's got to be a stern. But, we would, we basically would put aircraft inside of a closed container, and we'd fill it with either propane gas or hydrogen gas to get it to its flammable limits and let and let the drone work in there. Let it eat and see what happens.

And most of our drones that we've tested so far have have or all of them have passed the test. Now, you know, I got always gotta put this disclaimer out there. Chief's always telling me to make sure you disclaim. We are not saying you can fly a drone into a flammable atmosphere. That is not what we're saying.

What we are saying is that if my drone ended up in or around a flammable atmosphere, I'm confident that my drone would not be the cause of the, of an explosion or something like that. So, even though we do some advanced air monitoring stuff, even though the drone is is going into some of these our our mission is not to to plunge it into, you know, fuel rich, you know, environment. Our most of what we're doing is trying to determine what gear we need to wear. Is this a flammable gas?

Is it a chemical gas? And by the drone being able to gather that information for us, checks a lot of those boxes. So once we get it we know it's gas. We'll pull it out anyways.

We're not gonna be sitting in there. Yeah. Unless we may land or air monitor remotely. But, again, that's just for, like, hey.

There's a school over here. We have an incident over here. Let's land the drone here. We'll air monitor and see if Yep.

Once the winds change, we may have to make some different decisions, but we're not, like, blasting it into the problem.

Exactly.

I hope that helps.

It's it's it's a question that comes up a lot, especially when people are going through their their, procurement questions. They wanna check the box and, you know, they wanna ask that question. They ask a bunch of other questions. And if I if this drone fell in the water, is it gonna be good after that?

So on and so forth. Like, you know, and it's okay. Those questions should be asked. You're you're spending a decent amount of coin of the taxpayers' money, and you want it to be a a a value for your agency and for the community.

Let me let me say more. So for those of you who are interested in in, you know, kinda pursuing that a little more, our YouTube channel, our fire department's YouTube channel, SMFR nine one one. SMFR, like Southern Manatee Fire Rescue nine one one on YouTube. A lot of those testings that we did, all the videos that we've created, decontamination testing, we've done a bunch of different stuff. So encourage you to check that out.

If that helps you better help your administrators understand what you're trying to accomplish or what we can do with these, that's a it's a good resource to use.

Sorry. No. You're okay. So one of the questions, oh, also, that has come up here, in using photogrammetry versus lidar.

And I'll I'll touch on it real quick and maybe you can add to it, but, it's all about size right now. Right? Technology is here. Size of drones is here. So you have if you do have bigger drones, they're gonna either cost more or you're gonna have to do more, you know, more experienced pilots or it's gonna take longer to get it out to get going, so on and so forth. So it's all about size and technology where it's at right now.

Photogrammetry can do a lot of good things for you. It can it can add a lot of value. You can you can do a lot of different types of mappings. LiDAR does help you get below tree lines and see all that stuff.

So I think it's just about size and technology right now. You know? And I think once we get once we get to a certain point, it's it's definitely gonna be an added value. Both will be an added value over time.

I I agree a hundred percent. I also think, that use case is important too. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And and I've mentioned a couple times now, but we're we're trying to do a large area rapidly, I think would be more of a challenge when you're when you're dealing with lidar. Not to mention lidar, I definitely know it's got some great use cases. Yeah. Yeah.

They matter of fact, wasn't it, as New Yorkers and they use it for mapping that collapsed, parking garage, I think. It was mapping with light. So those are perfect because you're getting that three sixty view mapping so you can figure out where vehicles are, potential victims, stuff. But, and I I'm not saying we would never use it, but, every drone, every camera is able to do photogrammetry right now, and it's kind of an easy resource to grab Yeah.

Scalability, training, all that's really, really easy. And I'm not I'm not no dig on lidar whatsoever. I'm I look forward to the day where I can be, as proficient as that in time for photogrammetry, which I'm not that proficient in photogrammetry.

But, yeah. So, it's it's it's definitely an ongoing discussion.

I was out with Texas DOT, a couple weeks ago, and, you know, LiDAR, they're they automatically come up and say, just do lidar. Just do lidar. I ask a question why. You know, what what do you need? And they have examples of why they need it, but I also can show them that you can check the box on eighty percent of it here, and and and it's just fine. You know?

So if we have a couple more slides, I believe.

Everybody's gonna watch the movie.

I I mean, that was it. I guess that was awesome.

Okay. So, yeah, so we've been, you know, we've been here, for forty one minutes now. I think we've gone through the story of of of response of hurricane Milton to the port there in in Bradenton.

We talked a little bit about Saint Petersburg.

We talked about using photogrammetry. We talked about connectivity.

What else what else does a HAZMAT team in Southern Manatee, County of Manatee, Florida, look to do with their how do you where do you see this going? Where do you see I mean, the big term right now is DFR. I don't wanna I don't wanna put us right there yet, but where do you see drones going for, Southern Manatee Fire Rescue?

Well, you you mentioned DFR, and I'll I'll I'll broach that one quickly. But DFR is is it's a beautiful, you know, way to deploy drones. I love it. I think it's big definitely the next big thing.

I don't necessarily know if it fits every, department district, because the, you know, fire is a I I feel like the fire side of this stuff is a little more rapidly moving, and, you know, having something deploy, from a distance would be a little bit of a challenge. But that's not to say that we won't we won't get there eventually. I for us, I think that technology is playing a extremely pivotal role in, hazmat response. And all of our I mean, half the truck that we have here is full of hundred thousand dollar meters on it.

So it's not like we're brand new to tech. It's just, you know, we Hazmat is known to be, like, a little bit more of an old dog mentality.

So bringing in the new technology can can can be a little bit challenging.

Yeah.

I want to see a way at the end of the day, I'm trying to do everything we can to make it safer for our guys Yeah. Safer for the people that we're working for. And if that means building out more robust robotics, not just necessarily aerial systems, ground robots that can do a lot of the same stuff that we're we're talking about with, you know, air monitoring and all that stuff. Having multiple layers of of tech to be able to to meet those different challenges, you know, that's that's how that's where I see us going. We've had these conversations already.

We want to build out those things to do more, robotic type Yeah.

Responses.

DFR specifically is is definitely where the industry is going, where a lot of agencies are looking to go.

For example, Oklahoma City Police Department, they're they're moving forward with a DFR program in partnership with the fire department. And And I think that's hugely important. We talked about that earlier. I think this could be that that thing that brings those agencies together, brings the counties, the cities, all that together, and they they they they form, you know, almost an alliance.

Right? So you have your docks on fire departments. You have drones. You still have drones on the trucks.

You still have drones on the in the patrol cars. You still have drones out there. Right? Because those docks, those docked drones, they're gonna be they're gonna have to come back, change batteries, or swap out, whatever.

But to get eyes on immediately, so while they're while they're driving to the scene, they have that type of information is is is amazing. Right? You're saving you could be saving, resources instead of if there's multiple incidents, instead of sending all the trucks to this one place, you could send one there, one there. Know, there's a lot of a lot of decision making tactics to go into.

And I'm not a trained firefighter, so I don't know how you do that, but there would be the opportunity to then get on scene, put a drone up, and really, get the the best of value. We had a question come in, talking about, you know, like, a flammable gases and being able to map further away. Right? Being able to do the photogrammetry at a higher rate.

I think I'm reading this correct question correctly. Can you use the zoom camera that maximum zoom to do mapping? I wanna say from an X10 perspective, I think the answer is no. But because of the megapixels on the camera, you can map that three hundred, four hundred feet up and still get the data you need to make decisions off of.

And there's other drones out there too that can do that as well. How do you feel about being able to do, like, lower versus higher? Does it I mean, if obviously, if you can do it lower, you're getting more data points. If you do it higher, you're still gonna be able to get that overall scene view.

Yeah. No. And and, again, at at the end of the day, it's what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to get out of this?

If I needed something just rapidly to give me a a basic over I'm not I'm not concerned about centimeter accuracy on my map. Yeah. Do it at altitude, quick pass to get your information. Again, it's just the only thing you're missing by going higher, potentially is is just is, resolution.

Right? Because now you're you're adding that depth depth, altitude to it, so it's not gonna be quite as high resolution. And if that's not a need, like, that that two d map we just did, not necessarily a need to have high resolution. We knew what we're looking at.

It's it's it's too football field wide. That's it.

Yeah. It's understanding that what you what you need at that point, the use case.

I remember getting a call. This is a long time ago. Somebody was doing a mapping of an intersection of an accident. I'm like, Bryan, this dude wants to take thirty thousand photos.

I'm like, what are you doing? I'm like, walk me through what you're doing here. We spent about five minutes on the phone. You have to say, you go step by step by step by step.

And with the Descartes' release came, he had 3D capture, which gets top, bottom, around, goes in places. And they were trying to do a full it was a car wreck at one point of intersection. They were trying to do a full 3D scan.

Scan of everything.

Yeah. Of everything. And I I I, you know, I think I've gotten the combo at once. But it's definitely a learning it's something to learn, and, you know, over time, you know, train, train, train. Mhmm. And I and, you know, you won't run into that, but it's definitely, they could have done a 2D map and then done just a 3D map and just a small section, and they woulda had a nice little rendering there.

Yeah. And and mapping is becoming so, such as it's got a big movement now in public safety.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of agencies that have been doing, some some crash reconstruction using drones or some sort of mapping with that. And those are kinda like the dinosaurs and they're they're the or, you know, they're the ones that have all the information. And some of these new agencies are trying to figure that out, and they run into those kind of problems too. And we've we've had the same things. I do. Why does it seem to take somebody to photos?

It's because we're trying to do the whole thing in a 3D as opposed to 2D.

So Yeah. Yeah. There's there's definitely an ecosystem you build around. And I don't know if the drone's the foundation.

I mean, I mean, I guess it's your use case. Right? It's what you wanna do with your what what solution do you wanna solve. Right?

In some cases, the drone may be the foundation, but it's your mapping software. Mhmm. It's your connectivity.

It's your, you know, your your live streaming. You know, all those things create this ecosystem that you use on on whatever call. And the value of how you wanna, you know, get the best value out of is a route you would take to build out that ecosystem. And that's important, you know, to be able to to bring all those things in house and understand all of them.

And, you know, you you know, don't be afraid to, you know, go to conferences and go to those booths and be like, this, this, and this, and this. You know? Go wherever. I know last year at FLOCON, there's there we had, we have where there was Skydio.

I mean, G Nex was there, and my view were there. And there were people coming to our booth and, you know, usually, sometimes, when somebody comes by the booth, they spend thirty, forty minutes. Mhmm.

But they spent, like, an hour and a half because they were bouncing between all three of us.

Like, oh, I didn't think about that. Let me go back and talk to them. Oh, I didn't think about that. Let me go back and talk to them. So, you know, it's it's we're all in this together. Is that there's that term. But, I mean, there's really an ecosystem that as an agency, you should want to build out and really make your make the most seamless solution for the bosses up top to be able to make decisions.

Yeah. And and I would say, I think one of the common misconceptions that when people are in early entry into the game of drones are thinking that their drone is going to be the, it'll capture their image. It'll make their models. It'll do all that.

The drone is just a piece that gathers the data. You still have to have those third parties. Yeah. To be able to plug it into to create the models that you're trying to look or look at.

So, some drones are just doing a lot better than others. Right? Right. Right. Comes 3D scan stuff.

Yep.

But all of them are doing the same thing. They're just pulling the information in, and the software is what is creating your your models at the end of the day.

So Yeah. So I can't see who's listening or how many people are listening, but let's just say there's somebody who just got a hold of this webinar, and, they're looking to start a drone program.

They maybe have a medium sized agency. Maybe they have a a decent budget, whatever the case may be. Their their chief went to, International Association of Fire Chiefs a couple weeks ago in Oklahoma City. They saw some drones.

They're like, I need we should have that. Right? He goes back to his lieutenant or whatever and says, hey, I want a drone program. Where do they start?

How do they do they start googling things? Do they do they do they call do they go to, Southern Manatee nine one one YouTubePay? What are they what's what would be the best course of action to somebody just getting started on it with a drone program?

Obviously, you know, we we all kinda started this the same way. We had to do our research, and and your agency expects you to to do the best research you can. And but by doing that research, you're going to run into you're gonna find, repeated names, of for folks that are doing what you're trying to do.

For example, if you're trying to do mapping and you're law enforcement for crash reconstruction, you probably see Brandon Carr's name Yeah. Out of Pearland, Texas.

It's gonna come up quite a bit because he does a lot of that. If you're talking drones or in a hazmat, you're probably gonna see my name come up a lot. And those are the people you reach out to. Right? Send emails, phone get them on the phone.

We all share everything we have.

I've I've talked to hundreds of agencies and helped them from the crawl, walk, run all the way up, you know, because I was in the same shoes that he that person was in. Right? They're trying to get started. And the good news is there's a lot of resources out there now to get to get you stood up with not a lot of in, effort needed because nobody needs to reinvent the wheel here because we've already already blazed this trail.

But, yeah, do that. Another good resource too. Again, I I talked about drone responders before. Drone responders is a huge piece of the puzzle because it is a it's a already a group put together of all these public safety experts that have all the answers that you need, and they will help you.

They they'll they'll give you contact information, for your policies, all your training, all that stuff. Everybody that's ever done one of those, it's most likely you're gonna find their, documents with them too. So, social media groups are always a good one too. You're gonna learn a lot on those social media groups.

Just be careful. Sometimes they can get a little There you go. Into the weeds. But, yeah, the resources are there.

You know, if you're in the fire, you're trying to start something up, hazmat, you can find me, reach out, and I'd be happy to discuss it with you.

Yeah.

Myself as well. I'm I'm not a law enforcement officer. I'm not a firefighter, but I've been around these guys. And, if if if you come to me, I'm probably gonna send you to them anyways.

But at least we can at least you can get the right channel. Right? So, I I think we're good now. I think we've I think we've touched on what most we wanna touch on.

Is there any last words you wanna put out there, Rich?

No. Like I said, I appreciate, you know, that that call specifically.

Maybe you called if a Skydio was in town. You guys were there. And I made a phone call because we needed some more support, you know, what we were doing. Just didn't have enough batteries and and aircraft to to kinda do that.

Skydio was gracious to come out and, support us on that. So that was really cool. And and that's not the only time you guys do it. You guys do it all the time.

That's what I love about you.

Not in my mind, actually.

But, you know, yeah, like I said, the this industry is a rapidly changing industry. The tech is changing constantly. The applications are changing constantly.

The way we're, you know, implementing these into different apparatus. You know, flying a drone from the back of a hazmat truck ten years ago, people would laugh at you. And here we are building out robotics teams and stuff.

Yeah. And not to and not to, not to bring up the hot topics right now, but the amount of questions I'm getting these days, this past weekend, because of all the drone sightings and everything they're saying, and blase blase, it's it's really wild, hot wild how, how much education could be done Yeah. In this industry. And it's I mean, drones are coming.

There's nothing's gonna stop it. And when when I say that, I mean, they're coming to help us help us be more efficient, more effective. So, you know, education, training is it's just the same like anything else. This isn't this isn't just a toy, that you buy at Best Buy.

I think it's a it's a real tool, that can help you, you know, do a lot of really good things out there.

I I would say to your point too to add to that one, I I think if people understood how many agencies are still are actually operating drones They would be very surprised. They would be extremely surprised. And most of our operations are at night, like, at least seventy five, eighty percent of them. So the there's a really good chance if you're seeing a drone at nighttime flying with navigational lights on or something.

There's a good chance that some public safety agency doing some job or trying to to do some public safety work. Yeah. Because there's there's thousands of agencies throughout the country. Though.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at those drones, the pictures you're seeing, you know, at least they're following our FAA guidelines. They have their lights on. So kudos to them, whoever they are. But, I think we'll wrap it up.

Appreciate the time.

Again, I'm Bryan King, solutions engineer. Rich Gatanis, Southern Manatee Fire Rescue. Really appreciate your time, and, look forward to seeing you all again. Take care.

Thanks, guys.