The Olds Fire Department is part of a pilot study exploring how drone technology is being used to support emergency response in hazardous or hard-to-reach areas where rapid assessment is difficult.
The pilot began after a professor from the University of Alberta contacted Justin Andrew, Director of Protective Services and Fire Chief, through a professional connection about collaborating on a study.
"We decided that Olds would be a good fit to start this process to explore the benefits of drone use in emergency response, particularly in rural locations," Andrew said. "It's kind of been a grassroots thing."
Partnering with the University of Alberta, the department has been testing the use of drones equipped with visual and thermal imaging to provide real-time aerial views of emergencies. According to the department’s 2024 annual report, the technology allows first responders to quickly determine the necessary equipment and personnel, significantly improving situational awareness and deployment efficiency.
The DJI M30T drone used in the pilot project, owned by the university, costs $25,000. It’s flown by trained members of the department and has already proven its worth in live search and rescue deployments in coordination with the RCMP.
"We've been actively engaged with the RCMP searching for missing people over the last year," Andrew said. "And we've had several instances where we've gone out [on] large scale searches in large geographical areas. And the drone is an invaluable tool, because it saves the time and energy for us to focus the resources we have."
Instead of relying solely on ground crews and traditional fire apparatus, the drone can be flown over vast stretches of terrain to scan for heat signatures using thermal imaging.
"We can fly over a period or a location and come up with a relatively sure picture that there's nobody in that area," Andrew said. "So you can point all your resources in a different direction and narrow your resources to a very specific focus."
In wildfire deployments, the drone’s thermal imaging system helps locate hot spots that may still be smouldering underground.
"They can actually set up a grid search program," Andrew said. "Photograph it, and then transmit those thermal photographs to a base station... firefighters can walk straight to [hot spots] and dig their shovel in and find out that, yeah, there's burning embers underneath the ground."
That work, traditionally done with helicopters, can now be handled in real time by a firefighter on the ground—at a fraction of the cost.
Andrew described a vision where drones launch automatically from roadside boxes—remotely triggered the moment a call comes in.
"The box pops open, the drone fires up, takes off, flies directly to that location and communicates that information to the responding crews to better augment their response, gather information and make better real-time decisions."
Highway 2 is where he sees that future first.
"There's lots of car accidents every day. If we had strategic drones, all the way up and down that corridor... when we get a call that says that there's a multi-vehicle collision, you know, the things that we're looking for for information, is it in the north or southbound lane? Is traffic completely blocked? Does it involve dangerous goods? How many vehicles are involved? If we had this technology available... you can push a button and get that information within seconds."
Olds is part of a broader study involving Strathcona County and the City of Edmonton, gathering data across both urban and rural regions.
"They're utilizing us for more rural, somewhat kind of mixed urban-rural type data," Andrew said.
The university, which supplied the drone and partnered with Olds on training and data collection, did not respond to a request for comment before publication deadline.
The drone’s use is currently limited by federal regulations that require operators to keep it within visual line of sight (VLOS). Andrew and others are working with Transport Canada to enable what’s called beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operation.
"To maximize the potential of these devices, we would like to be able to operate them in BVLOS," Andrew said. "That gives us faster response and more versatility, if the pilot can operate it remotely, fly the drone to the location directly, and then transmit that information back to us."
"We're reporting instances of use and the challenges that we see," he said. "When there's meetings established with Transport Canada... we provide real experience and information to them to help steer those decisions and guide that revision of legislation."
There's no fixed timeline for the pilot.
"Everybody understands that this takes a lot of time," Andrew said. "They don't just change these regulations on a whim."
To operate the drone, firefighters must complete both a written exam and a practical evaluation.
"You have to actually demonstrate specific skills in operating a drone to be certified," Andrew said.
A commercial airline pilot from the university helped train the first group of firefighters.
Andrew is now a certified drone evaluator, licensed to run evaluations locally.
"Now we can train more people locally and continue that on," he said. "Because one thing we have learned is it takes a large number of qualified pilots to make this program successful."
Their target is 15 to 20 certified pilots.
"Right now, I think we have 11 or 12 and a couple others in the process. We're working with the local RCMP to train some officers to be drone pilots as well," Andrew said.
Unlike larger municipal forces, Olds runs on a paid-on-call model.
"We never know when an emergency happens and who's around and what are the other assigned tasks," Andrew said. "To be truly efficient, we do need to have a large number of people."
"Firefighters, you know, typically are like a bunch of kids that they love shiny new toys and like to play with technology," he said. "The people that got on board early were the ones that truly saw the potential and the benefit."
Andrew said deployment still depends on real-world logistics.
"If we have a house on fire, for example... we need somebody to drive a fire truck, and we need firefighters to get in that truck to go and actually spray water on the fire and do those essential tasks," he said. "People don't want to miss out on that opportunity just to be able to fly a drone. And vice versa."
"If we magically took this drone away from us today, our operations would be negatively impacted, for sure," Andrew said. "Because it's become a tool that we rely upon for better information and faster response and more versatile response."
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