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'Personal Drone' Crash Causes 335-Acre Wildfire in Coconino National Forest

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 10 2018, @06:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the countdown-to-new-regulations? dept.

McGruber writes:

A "personal drone" that crashed and burst into flames was the cause of the Kendrick Fire, a 335 acre fire in the Coconino National Forest (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconino_National_Forest) in northern Arizona, USA. Coconino National Forest spokesman George Jozens said that about 30 firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service and Summit Fire and Medical worked to quell the fire.

Article: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-breaking/2018/03/06/personal-drone-sparks-335-acre-wildfire-north-flagstaff/401493002/

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:10AM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:10AM (#650466) Journal

    This actually raises a question: Should a crashed drone be able to cause a fire? That is, is this an unavoidable risk of drone flying, or is it the fault of the manufacturer to make a drone that catches fire so easily?

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:31AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:31AM (#650472) Homepage Journal

    Should a crashed drone be able to cause a fire?

    Batteries, especially the LiPo packs you'll see in drones (high density, low weight, cheap) are made of fairly nasty chemicals that react very badly with each other, and the protection circuitry you'll see on them is there to attempt to minimise spontaneous explosions/overtemp/chemical fires that will result when charging, discharging or just sitting in a room (OK not quite that bad, but nastier than most people are aware of).

    Assuming the drone crashed and the cell was punctured on impact then it's a definite "will catch fire" situation.

  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday March 10 2018, @10:05AM

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday March 10 2018, @10:05AM (#650481) Journal

    If we are gonna go after the drone manufacturer for this, why aren't we going after Microsoft and whoever did this JavaScript thing for all these "wildfires" in our computer networks?

    I am not talking freak occurrence. I am talking about stuff everyone knows is well known for having this kind of problem. But use it anyway.

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