Gone is the bullhorn. Instead, New York City emergency management officials have turned high-tech, using drones to warn residents about potential threatening weather.
With a buzzing sound in the background, a drone equipped with a loudspeaker flies over homes warning people who live in basement or ground-floor apartments about impending heavy rains.
“Be prepared to leave your location,” said the voice from the sky in footage released Tuesday by the city’s emergency management agency. “If flooding occurs, do not hesitate.”
About five teams with multiple drones each were deployed to specific neighborhoods prone to flooding. Zach Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner, said the messages were being relayed in multiple languages. They were expected to continue until the weather impacted the drone flights.
Flash floods have been deadly for New Yorkers living in basement apartments, which can quickly fill up in a deluge. Eleven people drowned in such homes in 2021 amid rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
The drones are in addition to other forms of emergency messaging, including social media, text alerts and a system that reaches more than 2,000 community-based organizations throughout the city that serve senior citizens, people with disabilities and other groups.
“You know, we live in a bubble, and we have to meet people where they are in notifications so they can be prepared,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a press briefing on Tuesday.
Adams is a self-described “tech geek” whose administration has tapped drone technology to monitor large gatherings as well as to search for sharks on beaches. Under his watch, the city’s police department also briefly toyed with using a robot to patrol the Times Square subway station, and it has sometimes deployed a robotic dog to dangerous scenes, including the Manhattan parking garage that collapsed in 2023.
——-
This story corrects that 11 people drowned in 2021, not 2011.
Chcete-li přidat komentář, přihlaste se
Ostatní příspěvky v této skupině
Every so often, Microsoft design director Diego Baca boots up an old computer so he can play around with Windows 95 again.
Baca has made a hobby of assembling old PCs with new-in-box vin
Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey is back with a new app that tracks sun exposure and vitamin D levels.
Sun Day uses location-based data to show the current UV index, the day’s high, and add
AI chatbot therapists have made plenty of headlines in recent months—s
The latest version of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is echoing the views of its
When an emergency happens in Collier County, Florida, the
A gleaming Belle from Beauty and the Beast glided along the exhibition floor at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con adorned in a yellow corseted gown with cascading satin folds. She could bare
