Fucking Drones...

Chasing Video With Drones, Hobbyists Imperil California Firefighting Efforts

By JENNIFER MEDINA

The video footage, captured by a tiny drone, makes for dramatic viewing: In one clip on YouTube, an airplane strafes the treetops of a California forest with red fire retardant, which falls like a curtain on the smoky wildfire hidden below; in another, the flames can be seen from above licking angrily at the tree line.

“Very nice shot, what kind of camera are you using?” one viewer asked the drone hobbyist who posted both clips, who goes by the YouTube moniker jayzaerial. But other commenters chided the hobbyist for flying the drone near the fire, which can force firefighting efforts to come to a halt, or even cause pilots fighting the fires to crash.

After four years of drought, California’s forests are brittle and ready to snap into flames, and wildfire season has turned from a summertime fact of life to a year-round threat. With the most intense part of the wildfire season in progress, firefighters are finding that small, relatively inexpensive drones are a more frequent obstacle in their already daunting battle. The drone pilots tend to be seeking thrills, fame or entertainment, or to sell their videos to television stations.

“You’ve got people in areas where they think it is cool, or they want to see something the average person cannot,” said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which is known as Cal Fire. “But they don’t realize the implication of what they are doing. If you are in the general fire zone, you are causing problems.”

In at least five  fires  over  the last month, including one over the weekend, fire aircraft dispatched to drop chemicals or water had to pull back after crews on the ground spotted drones, fearing a collision. On Friday, officials said, five drones hovering in the area delayed firefighters from dropping water buckets from helicopters onto a fast-moving wildfire that crossed a freeway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Two California lawmakers are pushing legislation that would increase fines and allow for criminal prosecutions of people caught using a drone during a fire, and federal officials are considering new rules that would require all drones to be marked with registration numbers, which could help the authorities track down their owners.

California firefighters have begun making public service announcements across the state, warning that drones near wildfires are a safety hazard.

“Our message is simple: If you fly, we can’t,” Mr. Berlant said.

The YouTube user jayzaerial, who identified himself in a video as Jason Bross of El Dorado County, was given a warning and agreed to stop flying drones near fires. “Lesson learned,” he wrote under his video of the so-called Sand Fire near Lake Tahoe last year, “not a good idea to fly near a fire when air support is in the area.” Mr. Bross did not respond to requests for further comment.

More often, the owner of an interfering drone is never identified. So far, California fire officials say, nobody has been punished.

“These are just people doing stupid stuff,” said Mike Rivard, the owner of Radflight, a drone consulting company, who also leads a group of drone enthusiasts in Los Angeles. “It happens with everything.” He said the drone pilots who flouted Federal Aviation Administration rules were a small minority.

Fighting wildfires from the air is a dangerous business. Aerial firefighters routinely dip down to drop thousands of pounds of fire retardant, and can quickly be thrust higher into the air. They can approach fires from any direction, and must quickly change course as the hot spots in the fire move. After they release the heavy retardant, tanker planes are relatively vulnerable and unstable, and running into a small object could be disastrous.

California has the largest firefighting air fleet in the world — about 50 airplanes and helicopters — and the aircraft are used on an hourly basis during fires.

“If this gets into our engine or hits our wings, there’s no doubt we are going down,” said Mike Eaton, a forest aviation officer for the San Bernardino and Cleveland National Forests in Southern California, who had to stop the air operations he was overseeing during a fire this month.

The drone pilots, Officer Eaton said, “are like storm chasers, maybe trying to get that next bit of data, but instead putting a lot of people at risk. Every minute we lose battling a wildfire can be life and death.”

In a state where news helicopters zoom overhead regularly, it can seem difficult to imagine an eight-pound flying object striking such fear. But firefighters say that while pilots of news helicopters go through extensive training and coordinate with firefighters constantly, there are no such precautions for drones.

Mr. Bross was not the only one filming the Sand Fire with a drone. A photographer who identified himself as Jason Hall did so, too, and posted video to YouTube, drawing complaints in the comments section that he was the one who had disrupted firefighting efforts there. (He also received a request from CBS News to use his video.)

In an online comment, Mr. Hall said that he had acted responsibly and that he “would never interfere to get too close so that the people can do their jobs.”

“I launched the drone when there was no aircrafts flying at all,” Mr. Hall wrote in the comments of his video. “Then I did fly it when they were out the next day but kept plenty of distance. Yes, people don’t agree with that and I get that but that was my decision. What I did, didn’t harm or alter any efforts of aircrafts or firefighters.”

This year, drone industry leaders began a campaign called Know Before You Fly to educate drone owners.

“These things are being sold by the thousands, and many of these people buying them are not traditional modelers, and they are certainly not aviators,” said Rich Hanson, the director of Academy of Model Aeronautics, a nonprofit whose members fly model airplanes. “These people have no idea that the F.A.A. even exists, let alone what the regulations are. They are just having fun and looking for some kind of self-aggrandizement or some fame on YouTube.”

Matt Waite, a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska who has taught courses in drone journalism, which involves the use of drones in news reporting, said he hoped that state and federal officials could find a way to allow drones to operate safely within fire zones.

“These fires are newsworthy, and giving people a sense of scale and size and intensity is really hard to do from the ground,” Professor Waite said, “so being able to get some perspective from the air is a legitimate goal. It’s not just disaster porn.”