[HN Gopher] The Rain System "contains wildfires within 10 minut...
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The Rain System "contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition"
Author : jessenichols
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-02-23 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rain.aero)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rain.aero)
| [deleted]
| rmason wrote:
| Conveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none
| nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely
| packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline
| touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or
| multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area?
| This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some
| of the time.
| shaftway wrote:
| I don't think this would even be able to put out a single tree
| catching fire. Generally the fire is too vertical and the
| extinguisher would land on the ground and not be activated by
| the heat, so it won't go off until flaming branches fall down,
| at which point the fire is too large.
| davidbanham wrote:
| You're referring to a canopy or crown fire. It depends on
| conditions, of course, but it usually takes time for enough
| heat to build up that a fire crowns. There's generally a
| period where it will burn through the lower and mid stories
| and it spreads.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| Expecting something to work 100% of the time is far too high of
| a bar to set for fire prevention. If it helps it saves lives.
| vasco wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. It may help and save no lives.
| It may not help.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It may cause fires...
| landemva wrote:
| It will be in great publicity videos, with FEMA kicking in
| funds for purchase grants. Local firefighters will have fun
| playing with new toys funded by further deficit spending.
| lumost wrote:
| Or the drone's battery/electronics light on fire.... There is
| no good reason why the drones themselves can't be the source of
| the fire.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly my worry. To get to reasonable flight times you need
| very energy dense batteries which are a potential source of
| ignition, and good luck putting that out.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| My intuition says that in those cases, even partially
| extinguishing the fire would buy a bit of time, and in the
| meantime you've now got live aerial footage of the fire's
| location and progress to better inform the people who are
| responding to it.
|
| ... 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| _This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only
| some of the time._
|
| 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.
| demadog wrote:
| This is version 0.1 - it will get much better. Anything you
| can think of, they've thought of and it's on their roadmap.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Anything?! This implies they have thought of everything
| which is a dangerous assumption. I think it's important to
| ask questions, even (especially?) ones that seem obvious.
| dymk wrote:
| Lofty ideas, supported only by hope. People can dream up
| solutions as much as they want, doesn't mean it's going to
| work.
|
| 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Lofty ideas, supported only by hope._
|
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| Most startups fail. Declaring any one a waste of effort
| is statistically justified. Alternative reason to read
| HN: a sadistic desire to watch people fail, and say that
| I told you so.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is maybe unnecessarily harsh (but you do you).
|
| 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.
| jwineinger wrote:
| Hopefully the exploding balls don't fling embers away to start
| another fire.
| excalibur wrote:
| All I can picture is drones attacking campfires, grills, and
| hookahs.
| robomartin wrote:
| Yeah. No. As Mr. Wonderful like to say, take it behind the barn
| and shoot it.
|
| 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.
| rchaves wrote:
| "Rain acknowledges the essential role of wildfire in healthy
| ecosystems. Read More."
|
| I was glad to see this
| soperj wrote:
| When you read more, it's one big buuuuuuut.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The "read more" largely turns it into "Rain acknowledges the
| essential role of wildfire in healthy ecosystems, _but chooses
| to ignore it_ ".
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hi guys/gals, (I know HN typically prefers comments with more
| substance but) I just want to praise what an amazing project this
| is and I like how this has a real potential of saving lives,
| property and ecosystem. I wish you are able materialize your
| mission!
| hosh wrote:
| Neat tech, but I think prescribed burns are probably better for
| the general health of the forest ecology. Furthermore, prescribed
| burn uses a smaller tech stack (less dependencies on high tech)
| and is more resilient to logisitical and tech failures.
|
| Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire
| analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when
| designing a site.
| onychomys wrote:
| I do wonder how they're going to get enough coverage. There are
| plenty of places where a fire might start that are dozens of
| miles from the nearest road. You'd presumably want to deploy the
| base camps in some sort of grid, which would mean a whole lot of
| hiking things in on horses.
| micro_cam wrote:
| I'm very intrigued by the potential for new wildfire tech but as
| someone who lives in wildfire land in Montana i have my doubts
| about this video... detecting putting out a campfire is a pretty
| idealized case.
|
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By
| the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown
| larger than this drone can handle.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Drones are horizontally scalable. Instead of one, 50 can go
| extinguish the fire.
| joelbondurant1 wrote:
| stickfigure wrote:
| You're going to need _way_ more than 50, and they 'll need to
| coordinate dropping on a wide flame front. Also, it's not
| clear what they're using as a retardant - powders and gasses
| are almost useless in wildland fires. You need water.
|
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| You're off by a few orders of magnitude. It's more like
| 50,000, and that would only work for a very small fire.
|
| 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.
| NAR8789 wrote:
| That sounds like a scene straight out of factorio. I'm not
| sure whether that's delightful or concerning.
| buttscicles wrote:
| Yeah, I'd like to know how it's spotting these fires
| addaon wrote:
| Satellite fire detection can find ignitions pretty darn quick
| -- much quicker than I would expect.
|
| Also, some ignitions come from known sources (e.g. powerline
| downing), and monitoring and localization already exists in
| some cases (PG&E).
| svnt wrote:
| Satellites do that.
| qayxc wrote:
| Meanwhile in the world of forest management:
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
| hirundo wrote:
| The more effective rapid fire fighting becomes, perversely there
| is more demand to tolerate more fuel near structures because
| there is less expectation of losses. If that demand is met, when
| the rapid response fails, the fire will be more catastrophic.
|
| It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more
| dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable
| confidence.
| hexnuts wrote:
| I can totally see this being adapted for crowd control. Gathering
| has exceeded X amount of allowed people in one area, deploy tear
| gas and countermeasures.
| mabbo wrote:
| The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep
| putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much
| burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small,
| localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get
| the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives.
|
| 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.
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| 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.
| sharp11 wrote:
| Our past forest management practices are a part of it, but
| climate change is also a huge part:
| <https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/>
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't think a system like this is comparable to the 10 a.m.
| policy of attempting to totally suppress all wildfires. It
| still makes sense to quickly detect and suppress all _unwanted_
| wildfires. And as far as I know, the proposed solution to the
| 10 a.m. policy isn 't to just randomly let some percentage of
| natural wildfires burn as much as they want, but rather to do
| prescribed burns (and still fight to control and extinguish
| unwanted wildfires).
| dabinat wrote:
| I read about this a few months back and it seems that a key
| issue with controlled burns is liability. No-one wants to be
| responsible if the wind blows in an unexpected direction and it
| gets out of control. They're scared of the variables. And of
| course, the less you burn, the greater the risk when you do
| burn, so it's a vicious cycle.
| Teever wrote:
| > I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires,
| because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run.
|
| I take it you don't live next to a large forest?
| RangerScience wrote:
| AFAIK, it's now long (40+ years) that (at least on the west
| coast) periodic small fires are not only beneficial, but
| necessary, and that the US policy of "stop ALL fires" has
| been long-term extremely problematic. Mostly the "knowing" of
| this was finally accepting that the ways of those who
| originally lived here (first nations / native americans)
| were, in fact, better, since such periodic burns were the
| practice of those people.
|
| AFAIK, the CA forest service have been trying to ramp up the
| number of small, controlled burns, but it's hard to not only
| get the funding to do it (in part because it's during the
| off-seasons) but because it's actually really hard to do
| _because_ of the buildup up underbrush, which is the very
| problem the periodic burns address.
|
| It's like a tech debt situation. There's enough tech debt
| that it's making it harder to pay it down.
|
| I absolutely would not be surprised if forests on the east
| coast respond very differently to these kinds of burns.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Living near something doesn't make one an expert in that
| thing. I live near a school, but I'm still fairly worthless
| as an elementary school teacher or administrator.
|
| The actual experts agree with the parent poster.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/06/how-
| fore...
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-
| mismanagement-l...
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-
| prevent-...
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9347361/wildfire-management-
| pr...
|
| (We could also do what Australia does, and set better
| standards for buildings and neighborhoods for surviving
| fires.)
| cgriswald wrote:
| The grandparent poster seems to be commenting about
| relative risk rather than personal expertise. You may not
| make a good elementary school teacher or administrator, but
| it would make sense for you to have an opinion on how the
| school manages traffic. Certainly you wouldn't value my
| opinion since I don't live by the school and even if I had
| expertise in school traffic management I might not have
| your interests in mind.
|
| That said, I don't agree with the poster's attitude. (For
| the record, I live next to, and essentially _in_ a large
| forest.) A controlled burn could get out of hand, but in
| general, controlled burns will do so less frequently than
| an unplanned wildfire if we aren 't doing controlled burns.
| Or, in other words, whatever short term risk there is from
| a controlled burn near me is paid back by a reduced overall
| long term risk. Since I have no plans to sell my home (and
| even if I did, because I care about other people)
| controlled burns is a clear path forward from my point of
| view.
| Teever wrote:
| I live in a location that is more or less impervious to the
| effects of climate change and rising sea levels but I still
| support the development of technology like dams that will
| save lives in the face of rising sea levels. This is no
| different
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| Alternatively, this allows you to burn when you want to, such
| as when conditions are favorable to maintain control of the
| fire. You're correct that preventing large fires is important -
| control burns must be part of the solution.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Yeah, we should definitely put out small fires in August and
| let (or force) bigger ones to burn in March.
|
| 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'.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I would be interested to hear from a scientist on a couple
| questions I've had around this thinking:
|
| 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?
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first
| place perhaps it's more flatten the curve
|
| 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.
| space_fountain wrote:
| Isn't this a very norm biased idea. I think geo engineering
| gets too much of a bad rap. It's powerful and thus massive
| mistakes have and will be made, but we're only going to get
| better at it. Why resign ourselves. Would logging at
| sufficient amounts help, could we better smooth the release
| of water and fix this? I sort of hate the modern
| environmentalisms insistence that we should just throw up
| our hands and anything else is inherently bad.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| This is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of
| detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0].
|
| 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...
| svnt wrote:
| It looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the
| dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement.
|
| 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...
| byw wrote:
| Honestly $100M is not bad considering a single Boeing 737
| costs the same amount.
|
| But realistically you'd want winged drones, otherwise you'd
| need a large number of bases (power hookups, maintenance,
| etc.).
| python999 wrote:
| Maybe they would just monitor the corridors along
| transmission lines. That would be a tiny fraction of the
| area.
| Jabbles wrote:
| They aren't actually detecting the fires, according to this
| article linked on their press page:
|
| _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...
| temp8604 wrote:
| On a day where there is actually high fire risk (ie. high wind in
| hot weather) this system will be too late and not deliver enough
| retardant to make any difference. In those conditions you will
| have tens or hundreds of square meters of fire in within that
| time. Actual fire ignition will usually not be in the open away
| from other materials as shown in the example. It may be able to
| stop fires on days when conditions are mild enough to let it run
| for the ecosystem benefits.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean - it looks a LOT like it didn't even put the fire in the
| video out...
|
| 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.
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| Just wondering what the range is on those drones. If you are
| supposed to be covering 100's of km of bushland you will need a
| significant number of drones, or they will need to have high
| speed and long range.
|
| 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.
| gbayes wrote:
| I do wonder about the range given the payload is by necessity
| pretty heavy
|
| Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based
| ignitions, or in high wind in general
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The surveillance and response part is interesting. I can't
| imagine drones that size can deliver an effective response.
| Especially if the fire is in a tree crown (lightning strike) and
| not in a neat bounded campfire ring.
|
| Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Plus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for
| wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in
| policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been
| used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because
| they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an
| environmental investigator in government who was regularly
| brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FLIR/IR
| looking for grow ops and do paralell construction when they were
| more illegal as well.
|
| 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.
| Accujack wrote:
| It's a nice effort, but not terribly practical. They can't have
| the drones performing surveillance over wild lands for a number
| of reasons, not the least of which is that a crashed drone
| could start a fire. They also make noise that can disturb
| wildlife and humans enjoying the wilderness.
|
| Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the
| drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
| svnt wrote:
| The drones don't fly unless there is a fire, otherwise the
| drones become a major fire risk, statistically.
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| base the drones on an airship that can loiter for days/weeks.
|
| airship could also assist in surveillance.
| anonu wrote:
| Going to file this one in the "Amazon Drone Delivery" ideas
| box...
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