The Brentwood Fire and Rescue Department launched its drone or unmanned aerial systems (UAS) program in 2018 with one drone and one pilot.   Three years later, the program has grown to the use of four drones and ten drone pilots which are all licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration.  Brentwood’s drone program was one of the first to be developed in the state by a municipality and today one of the largest.  The program was created because City leaders saw the advantage of staying on top of modern technology available to first responders.

 Although the drone program is managed specifically by the Fire Department, it benefits many other city departments.  “If there is a missing child, we are able to get up in the air in less than a minute and provide some sort of visual.  We oversee making sure the City has aerial overwatch, or a view from up above and that could be thermal imaging, crowd control or surveillance from a vehicle crash scene,” said Lt. Jay Williams.

The drone pilots have provided mapping services to the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Department and aerial damage assessments following the March flooding in Brentwood which was instrumental to helping the Brentwood Planning and Codes Department document damage for FEMA. Drone images have also been helpful with tracking construction projects like the one on Sunset Road and the new Brentwood Police Department Headquarters.    

The Brentwood drone team has been able to help agencies outside of Brentwood as mutual aid has also been requested most recently during a hazardous materials spill on Interstate 40 in Cheatham County. “We were able to park ourselves a mile away, fly the drone and read a temperature gauge on the tanker to determine whether the temperature was rising or falling.”  Lt. Williams explained that it determined how emergency responders should safely proceed to clean up thousands of gallons of spilled chemical.

When arriving on the scene of a house fire, drones can more quickly survey how to best fight the fire from thermal imaging that shows firefighters where the hottest part of the fire is located.  Fire Engineer and drone pilot Caleb Lovett recalls one house fire with a report that the chimney may have been on fire.  “The thermal camera was used to look directly at the heat signature and determine it was all isolated to the chimney and had not spread to the house,” said Lovett.  This is helpful to allow firefighters to have a bigger picture of the fire, especially on steep rooflines that are on Brentwood homes.  “We have live video feeds that are set up so the fire can be viewed at the command post,” added Lovett.

Looking to the future for additional uses of the technology is what keeps Lt. Williams excited.  “This program keeps evolving and I am excited about the future,” Williams said as he discussed the future possibility of automatic drone deployment.  “Someday in the future, I would hope an incident would happen and a drone would automatically take off, fly to the incident, give us the traffic conditions on the way to the incident, hover around the incident and give us within minutes, an aerial view of what we are working with.  That will save time, money, and most importantly, possibly lives.”