Photo: The University of Calgary hosted an engineering panel discussing new technologies in natural disaster prevention and mitigation on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. From left to right: Alex Ramirez Serrano, Schuyler Hinman, Sandy Cummings, Shabnam Jabari / Paula Tran, LJI Reporter
By: Paula Tran
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
LiveWire Calgary
New technologies are being developed to help first responders mitigate, prevent and fight natural disasters in Canada, according to a panel of engineers at a Thursday morning seminar at the University of Calgary.
The seminar, part of the University of Calgary’s Schulich Connects series, explored new technologies and strategies that are being researched and developed to deal with natural disasters.
Schuyler Hinman, an assistant mechanical engineering professor, is researching how drones can fight, mitigate and prevent forest fires. Hinman said drones can start and monitor prescribed burns “in a safe and managed way.” He mentioned NASA’s Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) program uses drones to perform prescribed burns and situation monitoring.
This will take some of the workload off first responders because drones can help enhance their situational awareness, he added.
“If you can bring something with you in your backpack and just walk off and put it up in the air and immediately survey the situation around you in real time, that is really important,” Hinman said at Thursday’s seminar.
However, policy and legislative barriers are preventing the broader adoption of drones in wildfire management, prevention and firefighting efforts. Pilots are generally apprehensive about sharing air space with drones, the assistant professor added.
“The biggest challenge with remotely piloted aircraft and a lot of the new applications is air traffic and beyond visual line of sight. There are groups working on it in Alberta, and there are partners out east working on how can remotely pilot aircraft systems share airspace with conventional [aircraft],” Hinman told LiveWire Calgary.
“There are a bunch of dimensions to [this issue], but we have really good people working on it. Alberta, because we have a rich entrepreneurial space for drones, is doing a pretty good job, I think.”
One way to fix this issue is to create additional licensing for drone users who want to lend their expertise to wildfire management and wildfire fighting. Hinman said drone users need to obtain a license if they want to fly a drone that weighs more than 250 grams.
“Before it was a little bit more if you were a hobbyist, you had a lot of freedom. I think that there’s some reputational issues that remotely-piloted systems have that they have to recover from, where they weren’t being used responsibly before. Now, I think that the right decisions are being made to sort of bring that in as long as people follow the rules,” Hinman said.
New mapping technologies can monitor how disasters affect urban environments
New mapping technologies can also help geologists, first responders and policymakers understand how climate change and natural disasters affect different regions.
Shabnam Jabari, a panelist and an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick, researches 3D city models, urban area change detection and multi-modal mapping.
She told LiveWire Calgary that public 3D models can help understand natural disasters and monitor how they affect urban environments. For example, Jabari is working on a 3D digital model that will tell how much water levels will rise over time and how this will affect communities in New Brunswick.
In Canada, disaster officials are still manually looking at satellite images before and after a natural disaster and marking areas that are damaged.
“With AI these days, we can actually look at the individual buildings … We can provide a detailed damage map for those infrastructures and compare the satellite images or drone images post-disaster. Then we can combine that with existing digital images that we create to see how many buildings are damaged, how much damage was caused and where first responders can start with their help efforts,” Jabari said.
The associate professor noted that policymakers, engineers and first responders must be prepared for more frequent national disasters. Jabari pointed to Fredericton, which experienced a flood in 2018 and an even worse flood in 2019.
“These effects are becoming more and more frequent, and we’re going to get ready to face a higher frequency of these kinds of upheavals. So, that is becoming more challenging because we don’t have time to digest the first one and then reconstruct and then get ready for the next one. It’s going to come and have a rippling effect, and it’s going to get exacerbated,” she said.
Parks Canada collaborating with engineers and architects to produce new firefighting assets
Parks Canada says it is also collaborating with engineers and architects to mitigate wildfires, especially since they are becoming more frequent and more intense because of climate change.
Sandy Cummings has been a senior project manager with Parks Canada for the last 10 years. After the 2013 Alberta floods, Cummings and his team used the disaster as a benchmark to design roads and infrastructure because floods are no longer a once-in-a-century event.
“What now was the 100-year event become a 10-year event, and that really changes how we look at modelling and how we look at designing our assets,” he said at Thursday’s panel.
“We lost 60 per cent of our bridges in the western national parks alone from that one event, and that caused some very significant issues for the national parks in Western Canada.”
Cummings said Parks Canada is also looking at projects to protect national park assets from changing climates and wildfires.
One of those projects includes developing and maintaining fire-resistant materials, such as replacing fire-prone roofs with metal ones.
“We’re also looking at fire-resistant siding, such as going to a hardy board from a vinyl siding and all that sort of stuff. They’re always looking at changes in the industry that are coming up with more fire-resistant materials that we can apply to our assets,” Cummings said.
Teams are also looking at the proximity of the tree cover around park infrastructure and making sure there’s enough clearance around them so they’re not as susceptible during a wildfire.
“It was announced in Parks Canada this week that they’re now moving into a fire smart mode, which is putting fire breaks around communities and that sort of stuff. They’ve been in the plans for quite a while, but it’s just after the most recent fires that there is now more impetus to trying that,” Cummings added.
“The climate in general is changing, and what we’re seeing now … It’s just changing how we look at how we look at the designs, and how we look at the conditions to which we have.”