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Emergency Response:
Emergency Response:
New Jersey has been running serious drone-based emergency drills and live operations since at least 2024. For example, in Atlantic City this past April, first responders—including the state police, fire services, the U.S. Coast Guard, and private drone firms—simulated a marina fire and oil spill at Bader Field. Drones monitored the blaze, mapped the oil’s spread, and even broadcast public warnings, showcasing real-time situational awareness for incident command centers. Across municipalities like Elizabeth and East Hanover Township, trained municipal drone pilots now deploy these devices dozens of times daily for everything from traffic accidents to large fires, effectively triaging incidents before crews ever arrive on the ground jagonline.org. Beyond that, New Jersey also put hazmat-level precautions in place: after a series of mysterious drone sightings late last year, the Division of Fire Safety issued guidance that no firefighter should approach a downed drone—they must treat it like a bomb scene, cordon off a 300‑ft perimeter, gear up in full PPE, and call hazmat, police, and even the FBI.
That same wave of strange drone activity—where unknown drones, some as large as SUVs, hovered over sensitive infrastructure—also disrupted real emergencies. In one alarming incident, a medevac helicopter couldn’t land near Raritan Valley Community College due to hovering drones and had to divert, delaying critical medical aid. State police, the FBI, and the NJ Office of Homeland Security responded with frequent briefings, interagency working groups, and technology deployments like radar and RF detection systems . Although most sightings later turned out to be misidentified aircraft, these events exposed gaps in detection, regulation, and emergency coordination—prompting lawmakers to push for new laws empowering local agencies to intercept or neutralize drones legally and safely.
Bottom line: New Jersey’s drone emergency response is ahead of the curve—deploying cutting-edge tech in drills and real incidents. But those mystery drones remind us that uncontrolled drone activity can cripple emergency response—and once they fall from the sky, they’re treated like bombs until proven safe.
Cutting-edge drone program will empower emergency responders to reach remote terrain, saving lives through the integration of aerial and geographic information systems. LearnMore Here
“Through the ARROW program, drones will be deployed in 10 key communities around the state for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) inspections and situational awareness data gathering,” Dylan Blankenship, aviation development specialist at DOT&PF, said. “During emergencies, the drone technology will allow us to quickly assess situations, locate individuals in need and make informed decisions about resource allocation.”
When it comes to search and rescue operations, it is crucial to locate missing individuals as quickly as possible. There is little time to waste when someone’s life could be at risk. While rescue teams are wholly aware of this fact, they are quite limited in terms of their ability to find people quickly without an aerial perspective. For this reason, the use of drones for search and rescue is becoming more and more prevalent.
Search and rescue missions often consist of teams walking or driving in a straight line while looking around for missing people, but this technique only allows for a limited amount of coordination and terrain covered.
In fact, these teams may even have difficulty accessing remote or inaccessible areas safely —for example, if the terrain is rocky, hilly, has cliffs, rivers or larger bodies of water. Furthermore, there is only so much that human eyes can see or detect from a vantage point on the ground. Fortunately, drones can be used for search and rescue operations to help locate missing persons, to make it safer for rescue teams to do their job, and ultimately, to help save the lives of those in danger.
A deeper dive into search and rescue drone technology
When thermal drones are used for search and rescue missions, they use an infrared sensor to process infrared radiation, which is invisible to the human eye. The sensor processes the infrared radiation coming from an environment and turns it into an image that humans can see using color.
Thermal images look different depending on the color palettes used. The most popular color palettes for search and rescue missions are white hot and black hot. In this case, the object giving off the most heat will appear white and the object giving off the least amount of heat will be black, or it might be the other way around, and everything else will appear a different shade of gray.
The benefits of drones in search and rescue missions
The benefits of drones in search and rescue missions
There are a number of benefits in using drones for search and rescue operations, which is why drones are becoming increasingly indispensable in these missions. One of the main advantages is the enhanced aerial coverage that drones can provide, as compared to a human rescue team alone—or even a human rescue team with access to a helicopter.
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