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The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

rain.aero

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Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#31

Post by stickfigure »

systemvoltage wrote: post #10
missedthecue wrote: post #4

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.

Drones are horizontally scalable. Instead of one, 50 can go extinguish the fire.

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.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#32

Post by svnt »

motohagiography wrote: post #25

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 FL…

The drones don’t fly unless there is a fire, otherwise the drones become a major fire risk, statistically.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#33

Post by onion2k »

dymk wrote: post #24
demadog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#34

Post by dreamcompiler »

systemvoltage wrote: post #10
missedthecue wrote: post #4

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.

Drones are horizontally scalable. Instead of one, 50 can go extinguish the fire.

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.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#35

Post by python999 »

svnt wrote: post #26
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #20

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...

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. edi…

Maybe they would just monitor the corridors along transmission lines. That would be a tiny fraction of the area.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#36

Post by jacquesm »

vasco wrote: post #19
lucasmullens wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not necessarily true. It may help and save no lives. It may not help.

It may cause fires...

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#37

Post by jacquesm »

lumost wrote: post #8
rmason wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#39

Post by mabbo »

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.

Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”

#40

Post by Teever »

mabbo wrote: post #39

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…

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