WEATHERFORD, Okla. - The Oklahoma National Guard partnered with Southwestern Oklahoma State University, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Weatherford Fire Department to host a multi-agency wildland firefighting unmanned aerial systems integration exercise at Crowder Lake near Weatherford, Oklahoma, Sept. 25-26.
The exercise brought the Oklahoma National Guard, state and local agencies and several private UAS companies together to develop a common operating picture, ensuring all public safety teams have a shared view of a multi-agency response to events like wildland firefighting.
Col. Shane Riley, director of military support for the Oklahoma National Guard, explained the importance of bringing these organizations together as the use of drones in domestic operations becomes more prominent.
“We're looking at how we can be a better partner to the emergency management world and help provide an architectural structure for the employment of drones to help our own agency and the agencies that we work with to safely respond to those things with all of the tools and assets that they've got at their availability,” Riley said.
The two-day exercise centered on scenarios designed to test the OKNG’s and public safety organizations’ ability to create and share a common operating picture among multiple UAS operated by multiple agencies in close proximity to one another.
Each agency operating a UAS platform fed their camera feeds, location data and other information to a single incident command post where the incident commander and their staff could view, coordinate and deconflict both unmanned and manned aircraft operations.
During one scenario, the incident command post was required to dispatch an emergency resupply to notional firefighters on the ground. As all agencies were using the common operating picture, the ICP was able to quickly and safely clear the airspace for the resupply mission.
According to Chad Kinder, EdD, vice president of Strategic Partnership at SWOSU, as demand for unmanned aerial systems increases, the need for organized procedures and strategic planning is becoming more critical.
“As time goes on, we're seeing more and more [unmanned aerial vehicles] in use,” Kinder said. “The Weatherford Fire Department just added drones in the last year, so it's a great thing for these agencies to get together and learn how to use these UAV in the same airspace at the same time.”
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. Scott Patton, drone coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, said exercises like this are important to bringing the many agencies who would be operating UAS in an emergency together before the emergency happens.
“When we're operating our unmanned aircraft and getting the picture of the fire or the incident that happened within the state, we can also make it safe for manned aircraft to come into the picture and do their water drops and search and rescue,” Patton said. “We're not inhibiting their [manned] operations by having a drone or a UAS up in the air, so we can mitigate those issues now and know what that's going to look like so we can get our manned aircraft in without having an incident.”
Riley said most domestic operations missions, like fighting wildfires or responding to towns affected by tornadoes, will involve multiple agencies coming together to solve the problem, and he is pleased with the outcome of this exercise with all the different agencies doing their part to ensure successful training.
“I would say, this has been a great exercise,” Riley said. “We've achieved everything we hope to come out and do, with partner support. I'm really grateful for the industry, academic and state agency partners who came out to support us.”
