A private company, in conjunction with County officials, offered to fly their drones for free as to accurately map the damage to towns otherwise inaccessible to ground based surveys.
Until FEMA arrived; not only did FEMA ground the FAA approved drones they threatened the operators with arrest.
The perplexed drone operators went to a town needing damage mapping and they were further perplexed at the less than technically advanced methods being used.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
I guess Orville and Wilbur were busy. And Matthew Brady wasn't at hand either.
Here is more about the drones and their company.
Falcon UAV is a Colorado company that makes a fixed-wing UAV (called a Falcon) that uses GPS and cameras to autonomously generate (among other things) highly accurate maps of the ground. The UAV is hand-launched, with an endurance of about an hour, and generally operates between 300 and 1,500 feet above the ground. It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly in some parts of Colorado. Basically, the point here is that we're not talking about some random dude with a quadrotor flying around taking pictures: the Falcons are designed for (and governmentally approved for) mapping missions in public airspace.
UAV drones in action:
To review: FEMA not only doesn't want the most efficieny in fuel and accuracy, but they want to put lives at risk by having pilots fly over rugged terrain that has been altered by a meteorological event.