Flutterby™! : drones & damage

When I took my CERT training, I had recently attended WhereCamp and talked with people who were playing with kites and balloons and various other technologies for aerial photography (including our very own Eric). One of the discussions at CERT was about doing quick wide area damage assessments, and one of the take-aways from the people who'd done real crisis response at WhereCamp was that in an actual emergency, HAM radio is obsolete, what you really want is point-to-point WiFi so you can move serious amounts of imagery and real data.

And in subsequent disaster preparedness meetings, I heard the HAM guys bitch about how in drills all of their information was tolerated and then simply dropped on the floor.

So even at the time, I was thinking how it'd be cool to have interested citizens with the capabilities able to move actual imagery around to help on wider-scale triage efforts. It ain't really there yet, but...

Some n-copter drone video of the Napa/American Canyon earthquake damage.