The ability for the fire chief or incident commander to rapidly access fire and emergency scenes depend on the information they have at the time.
Responding to a fire a while back in a brush truck I could only go 5 mph because the road was all washboard. I could see smoke and the chief had additional resources coming. I only had 300 gallons of water so the chief had a tender from Meadview and mutual aid from Golden Valley who was sending a brush truck and tender.
It was five miles or so off US93 to the location of fire. At 10 mph it was going to take 30 minutes or more just to get there. The additional resources have about a 45 minute response time and then 30 minutes to the fire scene, so a hour and fifteen minutes to the scene, and back.
To a firefighter it seems like forever when a fire is so close and you're forced to go so slow. I was wishing I had my drone.
It can fly 40 mph so in this case it could make it to the fire scene in a little over 7 minutes and provide real time video to my receiver or to the chief over Youtube or other video services right to his phone.
In this case it was a small brush fire the brush truck could handle so we canceled the additional units about half way there. If they had made it all the way to the fire scene it would have put several pieces of equipment and manpower out of service for three hours or more.
In rural areas where response times are many times governed by road condition UAV's could provide situational awareness for commanders allowing them to make better decisions sooner and leave additional equipment in service.
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