Washington Wing closed its books in September on a monthlong wildfire “response” whose principal product was photographs of places that had already finished responding. FEMA supplied hundreds of pins. Civil Air Patrol supplied 129 unpaid people from 37 units in five states, several aircraft, drones that take off vertically because the ground was inconvenient, and a car with a camera on it. The fires had names — Sinlahekin, Modrite, Kaiser Canyon, Mitre Rock, Little Giant — and the mission, activated Aug. 2 for everything except the Spokane Complex, consisted of proving, repeatedly and at high resolution, that those names now referred to absence.
Unlike a search-and-rescue sortie, which can be over in a few days if someone is either found or not, this effort required an entire month of incident-management structure so that volunteers could fly, drive, hover, radio, log, process, and upload pictures of homes, businesses, and infrastructure that smoke had already improved past occupancy. Temporary flight restrictions, poor visibility, and active firefighting were treated less as reasons to stay home than as opportunities to switch which sensor got to look at the charcoal.
A Mapping Car for Places Maps No Longer Help
Capt. Donald Morgan Jr., the wing’s director of emergency services, described the vehicle-mounted imaging system as “the disaster-response equivalent of a street-level mapping vehicle,” which is a dignified way of saying the car no longer had to stop so a volunteer in a polo could get out and photograph a foundation. In airspace where aircraft were not allowed to look, the ground teams continued looking from the road, producing useable high-resolution files for damage-assessment teams who, by the nature of the assignment, already knew the damage had occurred.
Coy Travers, aerospace education officer for Bellingham Composite Squadron, and Cadet Senior Master Sgt. Madison Kaiser of Columbia Basin Composite Squadron operated the rig from the roof of a CAP vehicle, converting mileage into imagery with the seriousness normally reserved for finding a missing person who might still be missing. Bellingham had spent more than a year training for the moment a camera would need to work while the van was moving. 1st Lt. Patrick Buckley, the squadron commander, helped lead the deployed contingent, which is the sort of command authority that becomes necessary once unpaid photography acquires an incident name.
The same ground teams, drawn from Fort Vancouver and Bellingham and shepherded by Wiley, the director of operations, also fielded vertical-takeoff, fixed-wing drones that could be launched from CAP vehicles when the air was legal and the smoke was in a generous mood. When it was not, planners did what planners do: they moved the uniforms to a different method of collecting the same pictures.
Cadet Completes Full Lifecycle of a JPEG
Kaiser’s first day on a ground team was also her introduction to the entire industrial process by which a burned lot becomes a finished product. She unpacked, inspected, mounted, cabled, acquired satellite connectivity, operated the control system, downloaded, processed, uploaded, then learned teardown, cleaning, inspection, and storage, which is cadet professional development as practiced when the emergency is a queue of FEMA coordinates. Qualified cadets may participate in “appropriate” emergency-services missions; photographing what used to be a house was deemed appropriate.
The teams were among the first in Washington to put the new ground-imaging capability into operational use, a distinction that will look better on a Form 5 than on a property tax record. Independent power, satellite connectivity, and 360-degree collection rode along so that no volunteer would be forced to rely on a telephone tower that had, in several of the photographed locations, also left.
The Unseen Work of Counting the Cost of Looking
While crews generated files, Maj. Hayley Michelson of Bellingham spent the month as finance officer, tracking expenses for 129 people whose contribution to wildfire season was administrative completeness. The mission coordinated with FEMA, tribal authorities, local incident management teams, and wildfire air-operations personnel, which is a long way of saying that when one unpaid method of looking was prohibited, another unpaid method was substituted until a JPEG appeared.
CAP stayed out of the Spokane Complex on the grounds that local volunteers and nonprofits were already there, and that Washington Wing prefers not to stack uniforms on top of other uniforms. Morgan was careful on this point. “We do not measure success by how many places we can put CAP uniforms,” he said, a standard that 129 members from California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington tested only geographically. Success, in his accounting, was whether people who needed help were getting it, and whether capabilities were parked where they provided the greatest value, value here meaning timely pictures of the pins.
Col. Sid Wiggs, the Washington Wing commander, thanked the Washington volunteers and the out-of-state teams “who gave their time and efforts to support us,” which they did, for a month, by documenting that eastern and north-central Washington had burned in the precise locations FEMA had listed. The houses did not come back. The imagery did, geo-tagged, processed, and ready for the next deployment’s unpacking checklist.