Comment by dragonsky67 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonsky67 | Hacker News Reader

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One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line". Where embers fly ahead of the main fire, starting spot fires that unless dealt with just extend the reach of the fire. Currently a lot of spot fire management is attempted using helicopters with water buckets, but this is both expensive and bloody dangerous. Being able to use semi disposable drones could assist dramatically.

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.

Wow, that's a really great point. If we have these sorts of drones helping to contain and manage the allowed fires, in an automated fashion, we can reduce the effort needed to do so, or perhaps even control larger fires.

Maybe I was too pessimistic.

Meta: this kind of back and forth is what makes HN so awesome. Thank you everyone for keeping open minds. I learn a lot from good-faith back-and-forth like this.

Too pessimistic is a great, generous way, to summarize your biases which are those shared by most laypeople and even some self professed experts. Don’t try to turn wild fire into some stupid binary like everything else on tv, where you choose a side “pro-fire” or “anti-fire” and then insist that your way is the only one worthy of consideration.

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.

> - The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment.

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.

I wonder if a fixed wing drone would be able to carry a heavier payload for a given range. Moreover, these things don’t have to be electric; it’s not like the carbon emissions would be significant.

I'm going to qualify this by saying this is specifically in my professional patch.

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?"

> The wind fields around fires are not unpredictable.

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.

> 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.

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.

> One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line".

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.

The tech already exists, however the regulatory environment is not there (yet) for wide-spread automated beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.

The Australian bush needs fire to germinate new plants and trees too.

There are many indigenous plant species that do not germinate by fire (e.g., northofagus) and these populations are under threat as fires encroach on areas that have long been refuge for fire-sensitive plants. If a fire wipes out these populations, gum trees grow in their place and it takes up to half a millennium for these to die off. On the other hand, fire-tolerant plants are plentiful in places like Australia.

But not too often. we are losing forests because a second fire is coming through before the first generation of trees reached maturity. Once that happens, there is no coming back.

My point is that if we have drones which stop fires altogether, new issues which likely come out of that.

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