Cityscape

Video Pro's Drone Gives Detroit Fire Crews A Valuable Extra Eye

March 08, 2014, 6:45 AM

This article from Great Lakes Echo, a reporting project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, is about Harry Arnold of iTVDetroit, whose videos have appeared a dozen times at Deadline Detroit since September 2012. It's excerpted under a creative commons attribution license.

By Marte Skaara

Three big fire trucks have brought out ladders and are spraying water on a burning building from above. On the ground, firefighters and several fire trucks work to put out the flames.

That’s when Harry C. Arnold launches his drone and flies towards the fire, filming the big cloud of grey smoke rising from the building.

Two firefighters were hurt in this May 30, 2013 Detroit fire. Arnold thinks that the video he made of the fire []embedded below] shows how important it can be to have an eye in the sky.

“On the video you could see the bricks falling on the firefighters,” Arnold said. “No one else could see that.”

He hopes the video can show people that drones are valuable firefighting tools.


Harry C. Arnold has videotaped eight Detroit fires by mounting a video camera on a four-pound quadcopter with four rotors that costs about $1,000. (Great Lakes Echo photo/Jonathan Jackson)

Arnold, a Detroit filmmaker and photographer, has flown unmanned aerial vehicles as a hobbyist for 10 years. He has used them for filming for three years.

He’s been filming landscapes and different events, but it’s just in the past year he has started to film fires. So far he has filmed eight  from the air.

Safety Protocol

Arnold maneuvered the drone between electrical wires during the fire in May. Fascinated YouTube watchers asked him if he crashed into them. He did not, but he has had a couple of close calls which taught him a few lessons.

The first thing Arnold does when he arrives at a burning building is to check the direction of the wind, he said. He wants to launch where the wind blows away from him. But as long as he takes precautions, he thinks it’s pretty safe.

“Now I have no hesitations,” he said.

Arnold can quickly set up his small quadcopter, a helicopter with four rotors that costs approximately $1,000 and gives a good combination of stability and reliability, he said.

In a crash, his four-pound drone would do less damage than say a 15-pound octocopter, which has eight rotors.

Arnold started videoing fires the night before last Halloween. After a brutal Devil’s Night in Detroit in 1994, when fires ravaged the city, city officials created Angel’s Night where volunteers patrol neighborhoods to report suspicious activity. In 2012, Arnold volunteered at a Detroit community center to use his drone to patrol the streets.

“That’s when I started working with the firefighters,” Arnold explained. “I approached them. I had a drone and showed them the things I was doing. All I had to do was to show them the pictures and they were interested just from that.”

Informal Partnership[ with DFD

The Detroit Fire Department is excited about Arnold’s work.


Arnold's drone, flying at night, taped a west-side Detroit residential fire on Woodrow Wilson last November, as shown in the second video below.

“He gives us a vision,” said Dale Bradley, a Detroit fire captain. He has alerted Arnold about three recent fires.

The work with Arnold and his drone is very new to the fire department, Bradley said.

The firefighters have used the drone footage for training. Arnold has arrived after the fire and filmed hazardous material sites, and the firefighters use the video to see what they can do better in the future.

The goal is to get Arnold to the scene in time to livestream the drone video to the firefighters’ smart phones. That could help firefighters find out if there is a child in the building or if a floor has collapsed.

“Harry has the capability to go through windows and doors. He can go into the building and do a quick search,” Bradley said. “This can lower our response time and save lives.”

Regulatory Barrier for City

To operate a drone itself, the fire department, as a public institution, would need a Certificate of Authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration.

To get permission to fly, the firefighters would have to provide federal officials with the location 60 days in advance -- which obviously is not feasible.

Getting their own drone is not a priority for the fire department, which needs more firefighters and has many budget problems, Bradley said.

“Their hands are tied,” Arnold said. “That’s how I get to be able to help. [I] use the technology, give them ideas and get experience. It’s a win-win.”


This May 2013 fire at East Ferry and Chene is the one where falling bricks hurt two firefighters, as described at the article's start and shown in the first video below.

By working under rules that regulate hobbyists and not charging for his fire videos, Arnold said he is not violating federal rules.

But it is a grey area, said Matthew Waite, the director of the drone journalism program at the University of Nebraska.

“The fire department is not flying, so they’re not doing anything illegal. But I would suspect that FAA would take a dim view of this arrangement,” he wrote in an email.

If they are flying in metro Detroit, it’s going to be hard to argue that they’re not flying over houses or people, which would be against the rules for hobbyists, Waite wrote. “Issues like this are going to keep coming up more and more as the technology allows people to do things but the law does not,” Waite added.

Hobbyists cannot fly higher than 400 feet above ground or within three miles of an airport without a special permission. The vehicle must always be in the operator’s sight.

The Federal Aviation Administration is supposed to come up with a set of more extended rules regarding unmanned aerial vehicles in 2015.

So far the federal rules prohibiting flying drones over highly populated areas have made the fire departments in the big metropolitan areas reluctant to buying into the drone technology, Barter said.


Deadline Detroit note: Arnold shoots videos for developers, construction companies, real estate firms, golf courses, attorneys, governments and other clients. He can be reached at iTVDetroit@gmail.com

Topics of his aerial videos at this site include Heidelberg Project arson damage, the Packard Plant, a search for Jimmy Hoffa's remains, Redford High's demolition, Belle Isle and Campus Martius skaters. Here are examples of his views of two Detroit fires last year, starting with one mentioned at this article's start:


Read more:  Great Lakes Echo


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