Texas drone teams help Hurricane Helene relief efforts

TEXAS - Communities in Tennessee and the Carolinas are still recovering from Hurricane Helene. A Texas-trained drone team is there taking part in search and recovery efforts.

Drone video from a recent mission flown along the Nolichucky River near Erwin, Tennessee, showed areas severely damaged after Hurricane Helene.

"It is absolute destruction," said drone pilot Chris Starnes.

Starnes leads a drone flight team, called First to Deploy, that went to the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

"It's just insane. I can't compare it to anything that I've personally seen in my lifetime other than Hurricane Katrina," said Starnes.

Starnes sent FOX 7 images of the large piles of debris left by the floodwaters. The scene is like what happened on the Blanco River in 2015 after the Memorial Day flood near Wimberley.

"And we learned a lot," said Gene Robinson.

Gene Robinson is a drone expert who lives in Wimberley. He has worked on several high-profile searches, like the search for Jason Landry. He trained Chris Starnes.

"I reached out to Chris and said, 'hey, let's use those lessons learned and see if we can help you out.' And certainly, being able to map where all those big, large debris piles are and areas of interest where they can actually deploy ground troops has been the best benefit of the use of drones in this particular situation," said Robinson. 

The missions in Tennessee began as rescues but are now mostly recoveries.

"We ran a thermal mission the other day and were able to determine some hot spots. One of those hot spots was on a debris pile, where I've been told by our air ops director that that debris pile is where we found most of the bodies. And the last I heard, it was four out of five," said Starnes.

Images from the flights in Tennessee are almost immediately transmitted to Robinson.

"We kind of tag team it back and forth and thank goodness we can get good Internet connections. And we are literally moving terabytes of data between Tennessee and here in Texas," said Robinson.

Starnes noted Robinson has been working for the past several years trying to figure out how drones can improve search efforts. FOX 7 has reported on Robinson’s research flights at Texas State University's Body Farm. He was among the first to test thermal imaging cameras on small drones. 

The video sent to him from Tennessee is enhanced with a computer program.

"We run those thermal images that Chris collects with his drone through that, and it can pick up differences in temperature just a few degrees, and it identifies them for us, and it also gives us GPS coordinates so they can send people directly to that particular spot, and it saves them so much time and resources," said Robinson.

With each flight, new techniques are still being developed. Robinson and Starnes say what they learn is shared with drone teams who are working in other search zones.