Roseville Fire plans major drone expansion to speed emergency response
What once required firefighters on the ground can now be done from the sky, and Roseville Fire says it's only the beginning.
While drones have been part of the department's toolbox since 2020, fire leaders are now looking to expand the program with a long-term vision of placing a drone at every fire station in the city. The goal is to launch drones to emergencies within moments, giving firefighters and police real-time aerial intelligence before crews arrive on scene.
Within about a minute of a request, firefighters can already have a drone airborne, streaming live video back to incident commanders.
"We can see if we're starting to get thermal runaway, an incident that might be too dangerous to put people in," said Roseville Fire Captain Jonathan Davidson. "We can start getting video and transmitting it down to people on the ground who need that intel."
Davidson became the department's first licensed drone pilot when Roseville Fire launched its drone program in 2020. Now, city leaders are looking at the next evolution of the technology.
"They want to put a drone on every single fire station in town," Davidson said. "That drone can launch from the fire station, and there would be a person in the control center able to fly that drone and provide the aerial reconnaissance."
The expanded system would allow drones to respond automatically to vehicle crashes, fires and other emergencies while being operated remotely from a centralized control center. Fire officials say the added aerial perspective can help incident commanders make faster, safer decisions before firefighters enter potentially dangerous situations.
As the program grows, so will the need for trained drone operators.
Roseville Fire Battalion Chief Thanh Pham believes military veterans are especially well-suited for the role because of their experience making critical decisions with limited information.
"We're pretty much problem solvers," Pham said. "A lot of times in an emergency, we're given about 60 to 70 percent of the facts and you have to take action. I think that's a skill set a lot of veterans have that can translate to civilian life or the fire service."
That's where the Veterans Workforce Alliance hopes to help, connecting former service members with departments building drone programs.
"When an organization needs drones and drone operators, the military has them," said Veterans Workforce Alliance board member Nathan Champion. "About 200,000 military personnel transition out of the military every year, so that's a perfect source for organizations that have that need."
For Davidson, the expanding drone program reflects how much the fire service has evolved over the past 25 years.
"There's so many different things that we do in this profession that are outside of just taking a hose into a burning building and putting water on the fire," he said.
From boots on the ground to eyes in the sky, Roseville firefighters say drones are becoming an increasingly important tool, helping crews gather critical information faster, improve firefighter safety and shape the future of emergency response.
