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CITY OFSOUTH BEND OFFICE OF THE CLERK He continued, We've used drones in fire scenarios. As you can see in the picture on the right-hand side, that's actually using a thermal imaging camera that we have on one (1) of our drones. You can see that's at our training center.That's a burn house,a residential burn house,and on the second (2'") floor, where you see the firefighter where he's all lit up, that's because he just walked out of that burn room. The inside of the door is bright because that room has a fire going in it, and so it's hotter than the outside air. Using the thermal imager, we can identify where the hot spot is in the house. Incidentally, we have thermal imagers that we use, hand held, when we're inside a fire, where we can actually identify where a cooler area is. Especially, if we can see a shadow of a person in there, even if there's no visibility in the room, you can use the thermal imager to identify a person or a body that's in that room. This is a tremendous asset for us. He went on, One(1)of the things that we initially thought about was if we have a thermal imaging camera on a drone at night. We might be able to see somebody who falls in the river much quicker than just using lights and somebody on a bridge. We've actually been working with some folks at Notre Dame to dump out some software and doing research with them. Dr. Wong, and also with Denise Riedl over here from the Office of Innovation and a couple of the folks over there. We are excited about this program. Tomorrow we're going to have a meeting to talk about drone fleet management program for the City. We're excited because we got to do the pilot program for the City in regard to this. I just want to bring this to the Council's attention. We're not asking for a lot of extra money for this, and we just want to make sure you knew it was happening. Also, community risk reduction. This is something that we do all the time, but I just want to put a quick focus on it. One(1) of the South Bend staff programs that we did was identifying specific areas in the City that were at greater risk for having a house fire. Not only having a house fire, but having a house fire that was in a home without a smoke alarm. The City of New Orleans Fire Department created a formula that they believe, using census data to identify, using different questionnaires, as to finding areas to greater risk of fire and no smoke alarm. Chief Cox continued, At the department, is we've applied that formula to different census tracts within the City, and we've identified specific neighborhoods where we believe that the risk is greater. We've targeted those areas to do smoke alarm blitzes in the City. I know Committee Chair White,myself, and Councilmember McBride,have actually even been out on our alarm campaign, installing smoke alarms in their districts. We're excited about the fact that we started doing this. He went on,The State Fire Marshal's Office actually started a program,just this year, to get more alarms out to local entities in the state. I believe they've pledged a hundred alarms to our program. At least one hundred(100)smoke alarms for our program. We've also partnered with the local Red Cross, and they've been phenomenal in supplying us with not only smoke alarms, but also personnel that'll go out and help us give safety briefings and things along those lines in homes. We've already installed, in this program, thousands of alarms in the city just in the last two (2) years. That's fantastic. He continued, Our public education folks with Captain Gerard Ellis and Chief Rodriguez have been phenomenal in pushing this program forward along with our public education outreach programs in the schools and different businesses throughout the City. It's been great. I can't say this enough, the cheapest way for us to prevent a tragedy is by going out and addressing it before it happens. There's no question about that. This is another cultural thing, our folks are very much tuned into this. We do provide a ton of outreach within the City every year,to get out there and do these public education events, to be able to hopefully reduce the amount of property damage, life EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227W Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574.235.9173 TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 11