Technological Innovation in Emergency Technical Rescue: The Deployment of CNVVF UAS to Support the Director of Forest Fire Fighting Operations

Over the past few years, partly due to climate change, and the reduction in rainfall, the forest fire season in Italy is expanding and the territory will find itself increasingly subject to extreme natural events. Among the institutional tasks of the National Fire Brigade (CNVVF) is also the contribution in the activities of extinguishing wildfires, particularly when they threaten anthropized areas and in any case for complex events in which the intervention of the air assets of the State fleet is necessary. The search for aids to optimize active firefighting activities has allowed the Corps to experiment and deepen the use of technology in forest firefighting activities. In particular, the use of remotely piloted aerial systems in support of the Director of Extinguishing Operations (DOS) has been found to be particularly useful because of their ability to acquire data and information that can be used to optimize resources for response to the event. The structured and coordinated deployment of such systems can be particularly useful, especially during the night, to monitor the progress of the flame front and plan for the next morning’s activities. In addition, they can be useful to identify “hot spots” or “hot areas” on which to direct the teams assigned to clean-up when active fronts are no longer present. Data and information acquired by remotely piloted aircraft systems have the advantage of being associated with geographic coordinates, and this allows the creation of mapping databases that can be pooled among the various agencies working together to face the event.