EmergencyTech.org

Here’s a good one from Brice Schneier over at the (quite excellent) Schneier on Security blog:

In the small Massachusetts town of Cheshire (pop. 3,500) there is reason for celebration, and dismay. You see, the Cheshire Fire Department has two problems: they need a new fire truck and they need to find a way to spend the homeland security grant that they recently recieved. A grant to the tune of $665,962, a mere 26 (yes, twenty-six) times their annual operating budget.

Don’t see the problem yet? Read on:

And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck.

Instead, the town won a grant to fortify the ranks of its volunteer brigade. Its selectmen plan to huddle later this month to hash out a spending plan.

Asked how the money will be spent, Cheshire Fire Chief George Sweet cryptically replied yesterday: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Sweet said he couldn’t say much more about the windfall. Indeed, Cheshire’s officialdom is a nervous wreck over it and is reviewing federal grant guidelines.

“We’ve never had this much money dropped in our laps,” said Cheshire town administrator Mark Webber. “People get fined and go to jail because they don’t handle money like this properly.”

Although the town is home to the Cheshire Cheese Monument (a quite impressive pile of cheese, at that), there is little else to justify this small town department receiving the largest grant award of any town or agency in the state of Massachusetts.

What this amounts to is nothing more than pork-barrel politics, say some Washington security insiders:

Security specialist James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, was blunt: “It’s pure pork. It has nothing to do with homeland security.”

The money comes from the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grants, a program that was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security after the agency was established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Asked about Cheshire’s grant, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Val Bunting said yesterday that the town “presented a multifaceted project proposal.” She said the grant could be spent over four years, but she would not elaborate .

Carafano said the emergency response program was designed to funnel money to small fire departments and has wide support in Washington “because everyone has a fire department in their district.”

But now, Carafano said, “the money is spent under the big lie that it’s about national security.”

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ARMTEC has developed a remotely-operated firefighter of their own, the newly dubbed SACI (Incidents Support Combat System). Unlike the Norwegian Ana-Conda this device is battery-powered making recharging batteries and other power management issues important logistical priorities but the concept of networking these devices but the benefits far outweigh the logistical challenges.

The bot, obviously immune to smoke, fear, and extreme heat, can quench flames in a trio of ways: a direct stream, foam blast, or a wide-reaching “mist” approach. To extinguish those hard-to-reach hot spots, it touts a maximum blast of 60 meters, and the cannon pivots from 20 - 70 degrees vertically while being wheeled around on the tank-like track system.

Fear not the robot, my smoke eating brother (or sister)! These design don’t seem to pose much of a threat to your jobs. They’re simply another tool that makes our jobs safer and provides more capablity. Swarms of remotely operated firefighting bots could save numerous lives but I don’t think they’ll make firefighters obsolete.

Via Gizmodo

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Aircraft have been used for decades to assist in fighting wildfires but they’ve always been either rotorcraft or prop-driven airplanes. Now they’ve brough out the big guns: the first jet-powered aircraft to deliver firefighting assistance in the form of 12,000 gallons of flame retardant liquid.

The stats are pretty amazing:

The DC-10 is a 31-year-old former American Airlines passenger jet that was jointly developed over the past four years by Omni Air International of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cargo Conversions LLC, a freighter conversion company based in San Carlos, California.

Both companies have been working on the program for two years with input from the National Interagency Fire Center. The original passenger jet airframe was reinforced to hold the belly tank and drop system, with assistance from Aircraft Technical Service and Erickson Air-Crane, makers of the famous Erickson S-64 Aircrane Helitanker (AKA Elvis).

Tanker 910 can be fully loaded with 45 of water inside eight minutes and it has a 500 nautical mile operating radius. The company eventually hopes to have a fleet of five such aircraft, based in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida and Washington, which could respond to any wildfire threat in the country inside sixty minutes. The aircraft can drop the entire load in eight seconds or strategically deposit multiple, partial drops.

Tanker 910 was leased for the day by CDF at a cost of US$52,000 but the economics make absolute sense with the Sawtooth Fire threatening the community of Big Bear.

Via gizmag

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Maryland’s CDEX, Inc. has developed what is being called a “meth gun” which is designed to detect and identify chemical substances from, what the patent application calls, “large stand-off distances.”

Detection is accomplished by scanning a spectral beam across a surface to detect the presence of trace amounts of contamination left behind by methamphetamine, other illicit drugs, or other chemical substances. The device has the look and feel of a traffic radar gun, is battery operated, is capable of wired or wireless up/down loading of data, time and date stamps of all tests, and stores all test results for later retrieval.

Apparently, “significant stand-off distance” is 12 inches away from a 4 inch sample (scroll down the patent app. a bit, it’s in paragraph 0018) which, to me, doesn’t seem to be that far away as it still requires the user to be “suited up” in a potential hazmat situation; however, it is further away than many other testing systems which require direct manipulation of the substance or surface to be tested. CDEX’s goal is to make the “gun” as common as the radar guns in patrol cars.

The battery-powered device will cost under $10,000 when it debuts, said Jerry Blair, CDEX’s director of healthcare marketing. Future models will be about the size of two cell phones with a color LCD display. Desktop units made by competitors, which cannot be brought to a crime scene, cost $30,000 to $50,000, Blair said. The meth gun could eventually cost no more than $1,500 a unit after the technology is further improved, Poteet said.

Final production models will be the size of a cellphone and have color LCD displays. No word on if it will play custom MP3 ringtones, as well.

Via BoingBoing

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