Unity in Crisis: How Drone Teams Mobilized to Aid Hurricane Helene Disaster Relief in Eastern Tennessee

(Part of a series on the drone community’s response to natural disasters)

Hurricane Helene, the massive and deadly storm that tore through a large swath of the U.S. Southeast in late September, triggered a tremendous response from the drone-flying community, as individual operators and private companies deployed their UAVs to transport much needed supplies and medicines, assess the damage wrought by flooded streams and rivers and even help locate the remains of people who tragically perished in the devastating floods.

Drone community’s teamwork aids in eastern Tennessee disaster response

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

The response of the drone community to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene demonstrated the community’s ability to work collectively, sharing data collected by UAVs flying in the disaster area with analysts positioned hundreds of miles away, to provide actionable intelligence to first responders on the ground back at the disaster scene.

Perhaps in no place was this cooperation more evident than in the hard-hit area around the town of Irwin in eastern Tennessee, where floods from the deadly storm tore through communities, washing out roads and bridges, breaching dams and cutting off thousands of people from essential utilities.

At one point, the severe flooding of the Nolichucky River caused water to flow at nearly twice the levels of Niagara Falls at the Nolichucky Dam near Greeneville. Chris Starnes, the president of First to Deploy, a Kingsport, Tennessee-based volunteer drone organization, said his group partnered with Gene Robinson, a veteran drone industry analyst and teacher, based in Wimberly, Texas to aid in the search and recovery efforts in the town of Erwin and in surrounding Unicoi County.

“There were a lot of people that came together to help in this operation,” he said. “There was a large presence of just first responders from across the nation, from Utah to Canada.”

Starnes said that when the Nolichucky River floods inundated Erwin, he deployed with his UAV equipment to the beleaguered area. His initial efforts involved search and rescue operations, his team’s area of specialty.

“The focus really was on helping our community, to help them find all their missing loved ones,” he said. However, after working in the disaster area for more than a week after the storm hit, searching for surviving victims of the flood, the initial rescue mission tragically turned into one of recovery.

Flying his Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced drone in the early-morning hours before dawn, Starnes used thermal imaging software to look for hotspots that would indicate the presence of deceased victims among the piles of debris left behind by the raging waters.

“We’d take our drone, and we’d map out an area that law enforcement thought might be a good place to look,” Starnes said. “We would fly that mission about 3 a.m., and map out a thermal area.” He would then upload the collected data to Robinson in Texas, who would analyze the images and underlying data to look for clues as to where victims’ remains could be found.

“We were transferring terabytes of data from East Tennessee all the way to Wimberly, Texas.”

Starnes said that in addition to helping locate the remains of storm victims, his drone searches also identified several submerged vehicles that had been swept away in the flood waters. His team relayed the GPS coordinates of those vehicles to local first responders to aid them in their recovery efforts.

Robinson, who has spent years promoting the use of drones for all sorts of applications, says that perhaps best use of UAVs exploiting their capture of imagery and data. “That is where my focus has been, the data side of it. Imagery of all types has all sorts of data embedded in it. And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s very easy to miss, even in a standard RGB photograph,” he said.

Using computer-aided analysis, Robinson was able to tease out the all-important underlying data embedded in the disaster-area images Starnes had sent him.

“In disaster remediation, there has been a lot of emphasis on putting together mosaics, ortho-mosaics, geo-rectified mosaics. That is certainly a help because it allows the incident command to be able to better manage their resources, to direct their troops to where they’re needed the most,” he said.

“Secondarily, now that photogrammetry has gotten better, we can now look at things like debris piles and do volumetric analysis,” he said. This enables local municipalities responsible for removing the massive piles of debris to accurately predict how many pieces of heavy equipment and how many trucks they need to do the job.

In addition, analysts can use alternate light bands to reveal hidden information within an image that would not be apparent by simply examining a standard photographic image. “Essentially, it gives the drone operator a superpower, because they can see things that you can’t see with a standard-issue eyeball,” Robinson said. “You can get a multispectral camera now that takes near infrared imagery, and we used it to find clandestine graves.”

Robinson first began deploying drones to respond to disasters as a member of the Wimberley Fire Department’s aviation unit during the Memorial Day flood of 2015, which inundated his home town. Since then, he has flown UAVs in response to numerous disaster scenes across the country.

More recently, he has taken a job teaching public safety courses at Austin Community College, which limits his ability to travel to disaster sites. But he still takes part in drone-assisted disaster recovery remotely, as he did in the aftermath of the recent storm. Robinson said he first began working with Starnes two days after Helene made landfall.

In analyzing the scenes of destruction from eastern Tennessee, he said it was clear that the floods had changed the region’s topography dramatically. “Every time we’d go out on one of these situations, we learned something,” he said. “No one could predict the amount of water that was going to come down that river.”

Despite some complaints from drone operators who claimed that the FAA was slow in allowing private drone operators to quickly respond to the disaster, Robinson had no complaints about the federal agencies’ efforts.

“I don’t know of anyone personally that was denied the ability to fly in that particular event unless they self-deployed and they were not attached to an agency of some sort,” he said. “That’s typically where we hear most complaints. ‘Well, they wouldn’t let me fly. I drove a thousand miles to get there and I brought all my equipment and they wouldn’t let me fly.’”

For drone pilots who want to respond to future disaster situations, Robinson recommended that they first become trained in the basics of search and rescue response, programs offered through established disaster-management agencies, such as the pilot’s local volunteer fire department.

“Self-deployment on your own ends up causing more problems to emergency management,” he said. Volunteer drone pilots must first get permission from local incident response commanders before flying within disaster areas.

“And if you don’t have that up front, don’t take off thinking you’re going to get it because a lot of times you don’t. They don’t know you from Adam,” he said. “Everybody wants to do the right thing.  But there’s things that you’ve got to do first to be the good guy and to wear the cape.”

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.