And with wildfires, prevention is key.
“The first few minutes are the most crucial for a fire,” said Giorgos Dertilis, who heads the local volunteer firefighting unit. “At the start it’s easier to put out the fire. The more the minutes go by, the harder our job becomes.”
Right from the start, the drone program’s value was apparent. In the first couple of days after the drone system was installed, a fire broke out near a shuttered hotel in the area, Dertilis said.Article content It’s a tried and tested operation. Designed and set up with the help of Grigoris Konstantellos, a commercial airline pilot and mayor of the southern Athens seaside suburbs of Vari, Voula and Vouliagmeni, it began operating there last year.Article content
An extensive review of the emergency response followed. “We saw that what was missing is for us to not chase the fire, but to be able to have a live image of the fire, of where our assets are and where the threat is,” Konstantellos said. They thought of drones.Article content “We’ve caught fires at 3:30 in the morning,” the mayor said. “When we sent the Civil Protection, they couldn’t even find the fire. We could see it on the drone.” Last week, when 270 lighting strikes sparked six blazes in the area during a storm, emergency services got there before the fires could spread.
Angelakis, the drone company’s managing director, said the Kifissia residents’ privately funded initiative “was the first time this happened on a volunteer basis and not by a state body.”
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