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applegrove

(123,448 posts)
Sat May 7, 2016, 06:53 PM May 2016

Firefighters are using drones to fight the raging wildfire in Alberta

Firefighters are using drones to fight the raging wildfire in Alberta

by Jeremy Berke at Reuters, Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/alberta-irefighters-are-using-drones-2016-5

"SNIP...............

Elevated Robotic Services — which usually deploys drones for mining companies — has been contracted by the Alberta government to help firefighters pinpoint the cause of the blaze, according to Reuters.

"It's like Google Maps but 100 times better," Mat Matthews, the company's operations and safety manager, told Reuters.

The drones will take images from the air, and hopefully pinpoint the blaze's ground-zero location to within a 30-foot radius. From there, investigators can search on foot for potential causes, and use that information to fight the fire.

The fire that has already prompted the evacuation of 88,000 people from the city of Fort McMurray was on its way to doubling in size on Saturday, the seventh day of what is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada's history.



...............SNIP"
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