It’s been two years since a lightning strike sparked the Lateral West Fire that burned at Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge for four months. The fire burned over 6,000 acres in Virginia and North Carolina as more than 400 firefighters from local, state and federal government agencies worked to extinguish it.
Our friends at NASA’s Langley Research Center have begun a project to design and build equipment that could help locate fire sources within the Great Dismal Swamp. Check out how Mike Logan, an aerospace engineer is leading a team to design an build an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to do just that, which could help put out fires in the swamp and possibly save money.
A firey tornado rages off Corapeake Road in the Lateral West Wildlfire on Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The fire burned in the scar of the 2008 South One Fire in a restoration area for Atlantic white cedar. Credit: Greg Sanders/USFWS
The following story was originally published on the NASA website:
You could say that the idea came to him in a cloud of smoke.
Over the summer, Mike Logan, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, put a group of students to work designing and building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that could one day help to snuff out fires in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp.
The origins of the project go back to August of 2011. A lightning strike in the swamp sparked a blaze that ended up burning for four months. At one point, wind pushed the smoke as far north as Maryland. Logan, who lives due north of the swamp in South Hampton Roads, often found his house in the path of the acrid cloud.
“After choking down a few dozen clouds worth of peat bog smoke, which I found out I’m allergic to, I thought, you know, there really ought to be a better way,” he said. Head over to the NASA website to keep reading this story >>
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region 