The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
rain.aero
rain.aero
Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
I think that's a good idea, since in general fires start when the sun shines.
airship could also assist in surveillance.
Look at the logs as it starts flying back up - they're clearly still burning, even after the 4 suppressants pop, and then they conveniently cut away very quickly.
The video reeks of being a demo thrown together in a weekend. The cuts to debug output are just goofy and the actual fire demo is extremely contrived. The hard part of this, in my mind, is detection... And they don't tell us really anything about how they intend to handle the complex logistics of drones canvassing a substantial forest.
In a drone system like this you're probably better off dropping the powder suppressant directly from very low. But that would require more complex custom fabrication of a delivery system. I think "Rain" just used the Fire Balls because of the simplicity of building a mechanism to release them, and not really because of any actual analysis of efficacy.
In their intended applications they're supposed to be hard-mounted where a fire is expected, or lobbed at a fire like an old-fashioned fire grenade... but the slow activation time just seems to rule that out as a good option much of the time. The only really compelling use case I see for them is mounting inside of electrical and equipment enclosures for automatic fire suppression, but there are other, cheaper products on the market for that use.
Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc
The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out.
I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.
As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive.
You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area.
You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land?
You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews.
Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.
I missed the 40 acres part, thats ludicrous. I live about a mile from the 3.6+ million selway bitterroot / frank church wilderness complex ... you would need a lot of drones just to cover the parts near towns.
I do think there would be some merit in a system that could detect a smoke plume quickly and slow them enough to give crews time to safely get there especially on days with multiple starts.
Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.
A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.
Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.
It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.
Even a swarm of these cannot compare to the awesome power of small and large (Sikorsky) helicopters as well as medium to large (Boeing 707-class) tanker aircraft attacking a fire.
I have lived in fire country half my life. You NEVER get to fires when it's a convenient pile of logs in the middle of an accessible clearing that a drone can hover 20 feet above to precision drop suppressant balls. The more likely scenario is that, by the time it is detected you have to drop swimming-pool quantities of water or suppressant multiple times. And, of course, let's not even discuss a decent amount of wind and everything that goes with the situational awareness that pilots have.
Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems.
[0] https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...
Rough numbers: 3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius) 6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy
Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland.
PG&E is your first customer.
edit: Even if I’m low by an order of magnitude on costs, PG&E is your first customer: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-p...
You are nearly TWO orders of magnitude off.
But realistically you'd want winged drones, otherwise you'd need a large number of bases (power hookups, maintenance, etc.).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/startups-working-to-fight-wi...
Each drone would be parked inside a secure shelter and launched in response to fire-watch cameras or satellite imagery. It would navigate autonomously to the ignition site using “computer vision,” its infrared sensors feeding data to AI software to estimate the size, growth rate, and direction of the fire, before “deciding” whether to drop retardant on the fire, create a firebreak ahead of it, or summon more drones. Human operators would oversee and approve its operations.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/30/can-bay-area-startups...
At best, this would provide more coverage more quickly by forward deploying drones. But planes are fast enough and you only need to use a smaller plane on a small fire, and we have plenty of them. Sure seems like techies had a bright idea who either failed to do the research or failed to give up after doing the research because it makes such a great presentation for investor storytime.
Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
99% of startups fail, this one will be no exception to the stats.
Sure, they might succeed, but there's no guarantee they'll make it past this super basic PoC.
They're a startup. That's what startups do. If you think they're wasting their time you're really on the wrong website right now.
I too am mostly here in a more spectating mode when it comes to all the VC startup brained ideas, but its not primarily people that fail, its an entire system of thought, and the money that gets poured into it; its staunch belief in technological determinism combined with highly sophisticated investment schemes and plenty of capital.
I am not going to the race to see the cars maybe crash, its enough to see the cars go round and round in circles.
IMO very few startups fail entirely. Plenty don't get to the point where they make a profit, and fewer still make a return for their investors, but there are lots of other things startups do that can be considered successes.
For most startups failing is an event that comes at the end of a long journey filled with successes. It would be wrong to only consider the last step.
> Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.
Literally nothing about the linked site suggests that this is the case. The commenter I'm responding to is functioning on unbridled (and in my opinion, irrational) optimism for a company that has one demo video putting out a camp fire.
It takes more than hope to run a company. You have to have a viable idea and execution plan, too.
- 50 drones not one - make sure they don’t run into each other - drones of different sizes and speeds - watch out for power lines - watch out for birds - don’t run into planes - don’t ruin the scenery for hikers by always being aloft - make sure they are charged - use as first line of defense before the humans come - make sure they can’t be hacked
Can you identify a technology that didn't have that quality initially? Even a simple thing like a pencil - what a waste of money cutting a precision tube inside a stick and somehow installing a carbon rod, which wears out so fast you can't even finish a book without having to build a whole new one. Oh, and it randomly breaks while you're using it and requires special metal sharpening tools.
If it was obviously cheap and reliable from a quick glance, it would have already been invented at a time before it was so obvious!
… in other words, putting out the fire with the UAS is a “best case”, and may happen more often than you’d think, but really it’s mostly marketing. That doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t provide real value.
Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were over 10,000 lighting strikes in one night in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. These drones would have been completely useless here as well.
The video also claims that a single drone can handle 40 acres. There are over 800 million acres of forest in the US. Buying 20 million drones is one thing, but keeping them flying is pretty much inconceivable given how quickly most toys of this sort quit working under field conditions.
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "single initiating events"...is PG&E negligence or arson counted?
I can name a number of local fires here in rural NorCal that would have been benefitted by drones with this tech. In each case a minimum of 4 aircraft were dispatched after an officer visited the scene. I have to wonder how the situation might be different with a new idea like this. Would it be so bad to keep trying and improving on such concepts?
I was glad to see this
I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run.
Take those drones and replace the water bombs with extra fuel tanks or batteries, so they can fly longer. Have automated patrols looking for fires daily, so that we can control small forest fires carefully- while letting them burn.
There are however a number of problems I can see that this approach will have to overcome.
- You need to preposition the drone in such a way that it can remain charged and also is protected from any potential bush fire before it's utilised. This could be achieved with a fire protected, solar powered shelter, but this significantly increases the cost. Maybe they could be deployed from a long duration aircraft?
- The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. I'm not seeing the average off the shelf drone deal with smoke, particles and embers and still function effectively. Also the sensor package will have to deal with restricted view as well as reduced GPS/Radio caused by smoke/firestorm interference.
That said, this system could be very effective in dealing with smaller locations, close to built up areas where you can target deployment for those high risk fire ban periods.
Maybe I was too pessimistic.
Controlled burns, which it seem you favor, do not imply an absence of firefighting. It’s not “fire, good or bad?” Even though many seem to want to have that sort of debate. It’s an idiotic way of thinking.
This is a good point. Bushfires are also largely caused by high winds that are unpredictable. It makes drones carrying heavy fire retarding payloads a very difficult proposition.
The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable. Landscape scale fires are driven by regional scale winds. Yes, there are some semi-complex interactions between terrain, atmospheric conditions, etc, but these are able to be modelled quickly and effectively. Stating that the winds are unpredictable is actually dangerous.
What is not unusual to see is that front line firefighters will be reporting a wind travelling in toward the front of the fire, and that this completely contradicts what predictive fire behaviour reports suggest. What they are seeing is that the fire is creating a convective updraft which necessitates an indraft that is probably contrary to regional wind direction. The fire will still, largely speaking, progress in the direction that the regional winds push it.
Perhaps your statement could have been improved by suggesting that the wind indraft near a landscape scale fire is both happening at a high speed, but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
There is a further issue of landscape scale. It is completely ridiculous to place these things all over the landscape. They would be much better as a deployable capability when there is a fire going so that new ignitions can be addressed. That said, most places with large bushfires have helicopters deployed with a much higher capacity for extinguishment than the retardant balls.
I find myself asking, as someone who loves new tech developments, "is this just new tech with glossy marketing for the sake of new tech?"
They are on a drone scale (the purpose of my comment) and you've acknowledged this yourself:
> but also can have significant eddies induced by the fire, landscape, and vegetation. This would make it very difficult for a drone to remain stable and on course, let along drop ordinance with any accuracy.
Considering that "wind" is how we describe "air moving", they're not wrong, they're just looking at it from a very different scale to you.
It's also a big problem with pine forest fires. The trees and their cones explode and when combined with the generated heat, the fire can jump over a three or four lane road in an instant. That creates spreading and accelerating fires which can go on for days and burn extremely big areas down.
We had a similar fire around a decade ago in a region that I go yearly, and it was a sad view to say at least. Kilometers of road under the shadow of trees were barren, black/brown mountains covered with ash and other unpleasant things. The region is healing by itself and help from forest services and volunteers, but it shows that keeping fires small is very hard.
Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.
I agree with you that controlled burns are good, but I'm saying a 'controlled burn' is impossible from Aug-rainfall.
And sure, letting the entire Sierra burn is one solution, but we have the technology to do controlled burns when appropriate and not let wildfires run unfettered. Those are not mutually exclusive.
Hence the 'critical thinking' snark.
The answer to stopping massive wildfires is not to stop fighting them whole cloth, because, surprise California's equilibrium burn pre-contact was probably 4m acres/year anyway!
First step, laws made to remove any liability for fire damage outside urban areas. Make it clear fires are coming and they must have a fire-proof house. But we won't, because the rich will use the poor who can't afford to rebuild their homes as a shield against anyone being held accountable.
No, the reason why the fires are so terrible is because we build way too fucking close to forests. When your house is a couple hundred meters away from a forest that's prone to catch fire, say goodbye to your house in case of a large forest fire.
We need to stop encroaching on nature so hard when building settlements, just like our ancestors did - they respected that nature needs distance from humans. Not just because of fires, but also because of pandemics, landslides, floods, hurricanes, storms... nature is dangerous, no matter how technologically advanced we become as a species - it seems as if humanity has gotten a bit megalomaniac in that regard, and we are all paying the price each year for that. And it's not going to get better, only worse with how climate change has increased the severity of extreme weather events.
Alternatively: make it clear to people that in the case they want to live in a fire-prone area, they have to protect (e.g. invest in deep underground water tanks for a powerful sprinkler system) and insure themselves. There will be no public investment or action in firefighting for areas designated fire-prone. Why should firefighters have to risk their lives for people who knowingly built houses in a fire-prone area?
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265354/area-burned-by-w...
I've read that because of this built up material AND dead trees from beetle kill, no water or snow, etc that the fires burn too hot and kill the regenerative seeds. Is this true?
If so how does that factor into the balance of that decision?
And do they take into account the carbon and pollution emitted that's a HUGE net negative? Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve
Plus landslides and instability.
I think I've also read burn scars don't absorb and retain as much water - but I'm not as confident in that memory?
We've been trying to "flatten the curve" for the past century. Turns out that was a bad idea. The only way too get back to a healthy ecosystem at this point is to allow a hundred years of excess built up fuel to burn.
California had artificially pleasant (i.e mostly wildfire-free) summers for many years. The next few decades will be paying the price for that.
"I know! Let's grab this tiger's tail even harder"
But I could also see the maths working out that even if we say only slow by 30% that's enough to give us another __ idk say 5 years to get fully renewable.
Thinking along those lines. I have NO idea if that is even possible true on the whole and just fake numbers I obviously don't know, hence asking.
More mushrooms means more water retention, less fuel that's less dry overall, and a niche in the ecosystem is filled , expanding activity in the adjacent niches, which in turn speeds the disappearance of biodegradable mass.
Also, some ignitions come from known sources (e.g. powerline downing), and monitoring and localization already exists in some cases (PG&E).
That said, what would be really useful is a surveillance drone we can send out when someone phones in a smoke report. 9 out of 10 times the call is nothing, but we still have to suit up, drive to the station, get in the engine, and go investigate.
Water is heavy and it takes a lot of it to counteract the heat generated by a wildland fire. Which is why water is not the primary tool for fighting wildland fires: McLeods, chainsaws, and bulldozers are. Fuel removal along a one-dimensional perimeter is much easier than bringing in massive quantities of water across a huge two-dimensional area.
I never thought about the liability angle, hopefully legislation can address that to make controlled burns more viable.
I guess this is fine if it's only deployed when necessary but I definitely don't want these things buzzing around preemptively.
I would love to learn the user research yall did. Hit me up if you’d like to speak with a recently retired smokejumper. You’re essentially looking to take them out of business (which is fine by me) but fires are never this small or controlled. They’re usually in an area of 1-5 acres and I don’t see how this setup scales to that magnitude.
I didn’t read all of the comments but I didn’t read any that mentioned this.
Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.
Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based ignitions, or in high wind in general
I was involved with the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe, California. That fire had a massive line put in for days, but a big wind caused multiple ignitions behind the line at night. The wind and the night prevented aircraft from flying. But drones like these could have flown. And they could have managed the tough terrain. And they could have suppressed the spot fires beyond the line, and helped that line to hold. And that would have meant potentially saving a city. Don't get me wrong, South Lake Tahoe survived due to hard work and a lot of luck, but as we know entire cities are burning and the loss of that line wiped entire neighborhoods off the map. These machines need to be scaled up to handle significant suppression requirements — something far bigger than these drones capable of helping hold a line and work in difficult conditions. I don't think small drones are it. But precision delivery, and the fact that you get immediate feedback on the effectiveness of the suppression from the drone, could be really incredible.
Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when designing a site.
Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
Does it alter the food chain through herbivores and, in turn, alter the vegetation pervasive, such that it's more combustable?
Being able to autonomously send a drone to a specific location is not new. Using a sensor on a drone to detect a certain thing and perform an action is not new. So the only innovation in regard to "containing wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition" that actually matters is how to handle the fire, and they didn't address that part of it at all.
Everything about this video reeks of cheap tricks from a children's magic kit, and the whole thing feels like another dime-a-dozen startup scam looking for a quick buyout before anyone realizes they've been duped.
The Australian CSIRO developed a similar project in the 1970’s but socialists shut it down, along with forest industry, to win elections during the 1980’s
But given that heat rises, I wonder how effective it would be against bigger fires. Maybe if it had a little side-launch capacity it could be even more capable?
I can only image what happens once people realize this is a new vector for swatting. Wonder if it will get a new name.
It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable confidence.