Drones Deliver Hope: How Texas Wildlife Officials Used UAVs to Aid Flood Victims

Texas Parks and Wildlife aids search, rescue effort in flood disaster

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

In a first of its kind rescue mission for their agency, a drone operated by Texas state officials delivered a life jacket to a woman who was trapped on the roof of a house that had been all but inundated by the raging waters of the catastrophic flood that ravaged Central Texas earlier this month.

The incident, which took place on July 4 in San Angelo, about 200 miles northwest of Austin, marked just one way in which the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) help respond to the disaster by deploying its own UAVs and helping coordinate the rescue and recovery efforts of drone pilots from multiple government agencies as well as non-governmental organizations.

A flash flood, which struck after 14 inches of rain fell in the early morning hours of Independence Day, affected more than 12,000 homes and businesses in the city of San Angelo and surrounding Tom Green County.

“This lady was clinging to her roof line,” said Game Warden Lt. Matthew Bridgefarmer, UAS program supervisor for TPWD’s Law Enforcement Division. “The water was almost up to the gutters of her house.”

The situation called for the department’s UAS team to deploy a component of its lifesaving drone technology, which had been tested yet never used in a real-life disaster. The TPWD was just one of a number of state, federal and local agencies that worked together collectively to respond to the disaster.

“We were able to get eyes on her and verify that that she was there and was in peril,” Bridgefarmer said. The drone team was quickly able to rig up the mechanism needed to deliver the life jacket to the stricken woman. The UAV operators also were able to keep a watch over the victim while she put the life jacket on and awaited the arrival of rescue boats that would take her to safety.

The incident demonstrates the tremendous value of the department’s UAS programs, providing tools to increase the ability of victims to survive in disaster situations, Bridgefarmer said.

“Just the mere presence of that drone being there provides that peace of mind that says, ‘Yeah, the rescuers are here, they’ve got eyes on me. They’re paying attention.’ I’m sure it brings some comfort to that person that they’re almost out of that situation,” Bridgefarmer said.

UAS team responds in a number of ways

The TPWD’s UAS team played a multipart role in response to the flooding disaster.

“Our game warden drone pilots routinely are partnered up with our game warden swift-water rescue boats,” he said. The drone pilots support the boat teams by providing a safety overwatch for the waterborne crews and by aiding in the search of victims.

In addition, as UAS program supervisor for the agency, Bridgewater himself was responsible for helping coordinate the multi-agency air response to the larger disaster, in partnership with Captain Aaron Fritch, who oversees UAS operations for the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

“Under the Air Operations Center, there is a joint air-ground coordination team the JAGCT,” Bridgefarmer said. The JAGCT is responsible for directing the tactical application of aircraft assets, “who needs what direct air support, whether it’s a boat or finding victims, and what requests are coming in from the Emergency Operations Center that in-theater aircraft can directly support.”

On Independence Day morning, with the activation of the Air Operations Center/JAGCT in Kerr County, Bridgefarmer began helping to coordinate the statewide response of UAS assets, whether they were coming in from a state or federal agency, or from private entity partners who were bringing their drones in to help support the greater disaster response effort. His job was to ensure that all the players coming in to provide support were getting plugged into the emergency response system to prevent any airspace conflict incidents.

“We’ll build a roster of who the entity is — in this case Texas Parks and Wildlife, Texas DPS and local volunteer fire departments — and then listing out who their pilots are, making sure that we’ve got the proper credentialing on file because their operation center is directly working in conjunction with the FAA,” he said.

The Hill Country flooding event presented some unique challenges to the organizers of the response effort. Because of the rapid onset of the flash floods, official had just hours to prepare a response, unlike in the case of hurricanes where they would have had several days to set up the response mechanism.

One consequence of this was that the original temporary flight restriction (TFR) in Kerr County, the epicenter of the disaster, was coordinated between the Kerr County Sheriff’s office and the FAA, Bridgefarmer said.

“Normally that coordination for a TFR on a statewide emergency like this is a collaboration between the FAA and the Operations Center. That set up a framework that was potentially challenging because, with that initial TFR, the point of contact for access in there was the Kerr County Sheriff,” he said.

Initially, the Air Operations Center drone-detection equipment did alert center’s personnel of the presence of a few unidentified UAVs in the disaster-recovery region. Such unrecognized drones could have had the potential of interfering with authorized drones or manned aircraft flying in the restricted airspace.

“Our UAS pilot drone-detection contact teams were able to go over there and have a visit with those private citizens who meant no ill harm, but just were unfortunately uninformed as far as the TFR and the severity of the airspace risk going on,” Bridgewater said. No arrests were made and there were no further incidents or airspace conflicts between privately operated drones and emergency aircraft in the area.

The FAA later lifted that initial TFR in Kerr County and replaced it with one that was less restrictive in terms of scope and scale. Over the course of the response to the flooding disaster, which lasted several weeks, the FAA imposed several different TFRs in the region, which varied according to areas covered and altitude restrictions, but the original coordination difficulties between the FAA and the Air Operations Center personnel had been quickly resolved, Bridgewater said.

Saving lives by providing information

One location where the TPWD’s UAV response undoubtedly contributed to the overall search and rescue effort was at Camp Mystic, the Kerrville-area private girls camp that saw the greatest loss of life of the entire tragic event. Some 27 campers and counselors died when the rushing waters of the swollen Guadalupe River engulfed the camp in the early morning hours of Independence Day.

Using a helicopter, the TPWD team dropped a drone pilot and a search rescue boat operator into the camp later that morning. At the time, the status of all the people remaining in the area as well as the severity of the floodwaters’ impact was largely unknown.

The drone pilot was able to provide real-time video of the devastation, helping to resolve a lot of misinformation that was being spread about the possibility of survivors still in the area. The pilot was “able to bring some validation of what the true nature of the event was and its impact in that area,” Bridgefarmer said. This information proved useful to the Incident Command Center, because it helped them redirect resources from areas where they were no longer needed to those areas where those resources could be used much more effectively in preventing further loss of life.

“Even if my drone pilots never throw up numbers on the board that say, “Hey, we had this many lives saved,” I know that our program has still significantly contributed to saving lives by clearing and providing that information to incident command,” he said.

Read more:

• New Thermal Drone Technique Emerges from Tragic Texas Flood
• Drones Join the Front Lines in Deadly Texas Flood Response
• Drones in Disaster: Why No-Fly Zones Matter During Texas Flood Rescue

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