00:00Thank you. I now recognize the gentlelady from South Carolina for her five minutes of questioning, Ms. Biggs.
00:10Thank you, Chairman Guess. I want to thank you for holding this hearing today,
00:16especially considering the recent wildfires that have impacted my own district.
00:22My thoughts and prayers are with the families and the first responders
00:26and the entire communities impacted by these fires.
00:31I have been on the ground alongside state and local leadership, and I want to be as helpful as possible.
00:38I have been inspired by the way our community has come together.
00:42That's the spirit of South Carolina, and that's something to be proud of.
00:47Earlier today, I received a message that so far in my district, 12,652 acres have burned with 30% containment,
00:59and that was a little earlier today.
01:02This is the second record-setting natural disaster that my constituents have faced in the last six months.
01:11The upstate is resilient, and it will rebuild.
01:15So my question is to Mr. Farrell.
01:18Can you describe the coordination between your organization, federal, and local entities
01:25as you engaged in the response to Hurricane Helene?
01:29And the second question on that is, what capabilities do you foresee drones being equipped
01:37within future disaster responses,
01:40and how might this expand the future missions of drones in emergency response situations?
01:50Thank you, Congresswoman.
01:53So the coordination is one where, especially in Region 4,
01:58we're very fortunate on the remote sensing side to have a collaborative collection plan.
02:04It's really a model that doesn't exist in any of the other regions currently.
02:09So our partnership with Region 4 stemmed out of work that's gone back about eight years with NOAA
02:16to assess flood mapping and monitoring missions through our NOAA cooperative,
02:20the Northern Gulf Institute, and our Geosystems Research Institute.
02:25The FEMA Region 4 took notice of the large UAS operations
02:30and reached out through that federal collaboration to begin investigating the opportunity
02:37for a large UAS to engage in these kinds of disasters,
02:41given the broad area type surveillance that we can be able to provide and that endurance.
02:46So we began doing blue sky exercises through Project Justice
02:51to really illustrate that integration into the FEMA operation.
02:56And so when a storm, especially around hurricanes,
03:03begins posing its threat to our region, the collaborative collection plan is put in place.
03:09The region coordinates with all of the stakeholders,
03:12including the state and local emergency management agencies, to understand what their needs are.
03:17FEMA will reach out to us, and then we will pre-position as best as possible to be able to respond.
03:24And as we get in, we, on daily calls, talk about areas and targets and interests for ingress, egress,
03:32damage assessment, search and rescue, and then we will get mission assigned and broadcast out.
03:38As we collect the information necessary, because we're doing this in a live fashion,
03:44we're actually doing it through a distributed teams call with our pilots,
03:48they can reassign us as needed while we're in the air.
03:52As far as capabilities in the future for this mission, I think that, you know,
03:57we had the conversation about autonomy.
03:59Autonomy is going to play a large role, whether that's thrown in the box
04:02or greater capabilities around sensors, greater capability around platforms,
04:08more ubiquitous type platforms in this type of disaster response.
04:13One of the things we're doing is doing assured safe training
04:16to actually train first responders in these kinds of missions,
04:19to understand the airspace management that exists and do the training for airspace managers,
04:24your air boss, if you will.
04:26And then what we also want to do is work with our state and locals
04:31to be able to enhance their preparedness and understand what the constructs are
04:36and what contracts and what kind of needs need to be in place so that,
04:40at least in Mississippi under our land grant mission,
04:43we can prepare our community for response from kind of a grassroots perspective.
04:49And I'm just going to finish up with Chief Fetterman.
04:52It's clear that drones will play a pivotal role in assisting disaster responses.
04:58What strategies have been used on the West Coast to integrate drones into wildfire responses,
05:05and how have they improved coordination between the federal, state, and local responders?
05:11Well, certainly creating situational awareness
05:16integrates information flow between local, state, and federal responders
05:20and certainly on incident management teams.
05:22So drones provide that increased situational awareness,
05:26and they're a great tool to utilize on those kinds of events.
05:29Certainly airspace de-confliction is a priority to us.
05:33Drones and helicopters can't operate in the same space and time.
05:36So we're looking forward to additional AI technology
05:41that will allow that to better manage the airspace.
05:44Thank you so much, and thank you all for being here today.
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