Unmanned Aerial Drones for Disaster Recon, Search and Rescue

In this episode of the Disaster Podcast, hosts Jamie Davis, the Podmedic and Sam Bradley are joined again by paramedic Jim Logan from Paragon Medical Education Group. The three of them pick up on a topic found in the news this week by Jamie on using consumer aerial drones while visiting national parks. It occurred to him that these devices would be valuable tools for search and rescue, as well as general recon during a disaster response.

Jim brought up an incident where his system used a volunteer citizen with a drone to try and locate a group of teenagers allegedly missing in a flood situation in Memphis recently. While the responders couldn’t use the private device themselves, they watched over the shoulder of the citizen while he piloted the drone downstream looking for the teens.

Responders and disaster units will need to develop new rules and standard operating procedures for using these types of devices before they can be regularly used, based on expert reviews (find more drones and Inspire 2 reviewed). Still, there is an opportunity here to come up with numerous ways to get these tools in the field and the Disaster Podcast team discusses some of them in this episode.

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Got a question for the Disaster Podcast Team? Why don’t you leave a comment below here on the site and we’ll get right back to you both in the comments area and by email, too! We look forward to hearing from you.

Again, a special thank-you to Paragon Medical Education Group for their continued support of this podcast as our partners in this endeavor to bring disaster medicine to you. Check out their page and educational resources that can help your system be more prepared for what happens in your area.

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