Drones & the Future of Fighting Forest Fires

Across the world, the magnitude and frequency of wildfires are escalating rapidly. In California, six out of the top twenty largest wildfires in the state’s history occurred in 2020. So devastating was the destruction that a new term was even coined - the world’s first “gigafire”– an unprecedented blaze spanning more than one million acres, or more than five times the size of New York City.

In Australia, the so-called Black Summer bushfire season of 2019/20 consumed an estimated 46 million acres and destroying almost 6,000 buildings in the process. With nearly 80 percent of the entire population directly or indirectly affected by the fires, estimated property damage and economic losses were in excess of $70 billion USD, making it the most expensive natural disaster in Australia's history.