Can Bilingual Window-Breaking Drones Save New Yorkers From the Next Hurricane Sandy?

Last week, I took a train and two buses to an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island, where I watched first responders pretend another Hurricane Sandy had just struck New York City.

For the sake of the drill, organizers kept many of the details of the fictional scenario the same as they’d been then: Emergency Management officials were told to respond as if a supercharged storm was causing devastating floods and stranding people in life-threatening situations. But the dry run also featured a major difference from the disaster that hit 12 years ago this month and left more than 43 New Yorkers dead.

This time, the city has drones.

It has drones with cameras that can read the logo on your jacket from 400 feet in the air and drones with sophisticated mapping software that can estimate how deep a flooded intersection is. It has drones that come on little leashes tethered to NYPD cruisers for continuous power and drones that are so small they can fly under beds and into closets and sound like dentist drills when they’re operating. It has drones that can transmit messages in 80 languages, drones with thermal sensors, and drones that can drop flotation devices into the ocean. It even has a drone that can break a window — the highlight of the morning for the members of the local press and the top brass of the New York Police Department, Fire Department, and NYCEM (New York City Emergency Management, pronounced “Nee-chim,” newly rebranded from the more generic Office of Emergency Management) who’d gathered to observe the exercise, which was touted as the largest-known municipal unmanned aerial system drill in history.

“Breach drones,” as I’ve since learned, look a little like crudely drawn mosquitos. Held aloft by four rotary wings, the $87,750 contraptions are affixed with rods on their fronts that resemble an insect’s proboscis but function essentially like a battering ram. Given the drone’s unsteady, bobbing flight and the way it repeatedly banged itself against the window to chip a hole in the pane big enough to fly through, I found the whole demonstration to be surprisingly entomological for what New York City’s first responders claim is the bleeding edge of its extreme weather response.

“We’re really just scraping the first layer” of what is possible, Louis Font, a citywide interagency coordinator, told me during the drill. As he put it, drones are “the Swiss army knife of the public safety world.”

There is a small problem, though: New Yorkers really, really hate drones. Actually, they hate all autonomous gadgets that give off a whiff of Big Brother. A security robot deployed in the Times Square subway station over the winter had to be guarded by two human officers around the clock to prevent it from being vandalized, and the cheeky New York City news blog Hell Gate proposed that bots like the NYPD’s crime-fighting “Digidog” are “the city’s most expensive punching bags” and teased, “we’re excited to watch as the situation unfolds.” Even the local wildlife seems willing to take matters into its own talons, with birds attacking drones deployed to Rockaway Beach over the summer.

The city acquired its first set of drones in 2018 and is now one of about 900 U.S. municipalities that have begun using unmanned aerial systems in its crime- and emergency-related responses. But with a police budget bigger than many nations’ entire military outlay and a techno-optimist mayor, New York quickly became one of the premier drone-wielding cities in the world.

It hasn’t been an entirely smooth journey, though. Plans to use drones to monitor private backyard Labor Day parties last year spurred privacy concerns rooted in a history of the NYPD abusing surveillance technologies and prompted pushback from local civil liberties groups. “We’ve got so many discredited examples of this mayor searching for high-tech gimmicks to solve real-world problems and leaving New Yorkers out to dry,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a.k.a. STOP, told me. “We end up spending a huge amount of money on largely unvetted vendors to buy products that simply just don’t fit the needs of our city.”

The question I wanted to answer on Staten Island was whether drones might be able to meet the needs of a city after a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Sandy. The overwhelming impression I left with, though, was of agencies that are in the awkward stage of a growth spurt — eager to use technology that will one day be indispensable but, for the time being, presents the risk of overcomplicating situations that would otherwise benefit from a more old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground approach, with potentially both comic and tragic results.

Much of this is simply because of the physical limitations of drones. For one thing, they can’t fly in winds of more than about 20 to 30 miles per hour, making them pretty much useless during an actual storm (or in a Manhattan wind tunnel, for that matter). That narrows their use to two main categories: before a storm, as early warning systems, and after, in search-and-rescue operations.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of the former use. Scientists expect New York will get about 25% more annual rainfall by 2100 due to climate change, and the city has over 500 miles of coastline vulnerable to storm surge, with over half of its environmental justice communities living within its 100-year floodplains. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments, which are illegal under the city housing code and often used as housing by low-income immigrant families. Making matters worse, New York’s emergency alert system requires a voluntary opt-in and currently has just 1,281,938 subscribers — roughly 15% of a city of 8.3 million. Last year, the city comptroller further claimed that the notification list for people living in basement apartments reached less than 1% of its target population. (A spokesperson for NYCEM told me there has been a 35% increase in their basement subscriber numbers since the comptroller’s comments.)

The drones come in handy, then, because “not every New Yorker is on Twitter, not every New Yorker is on Instagram or Facebook, not every New Yorker reads The New York Times, the Post, or the Daily News, not all of them are tuned into our press conferences,” NYCEM Commissioner Zachary Iscol told me. “And so especially for vulnerable populations and immigrant communities, you’ve got to reach them where they are.”

This summer, NYCEM piloted a program using drones to broadcast bilingual flood warnings in low-lying neighborhoods ahead of storms — an idea Mayor Eric Adams had after seeing hurricane sirens on telephone poles during a visit to Puerto Rico, Iscol told me. The drones’ machine-generated Spanish translations, however, were slammed as “incomprehensible” by native speakers. (Font, the interagency coordinator, admitted the translations are still crude since “they’re robots” and told me the agencies are working to improve the messages.)

Carolina Salguero, the founder and executive director of PortSide NewYork, which works with the waterfront community in Red Hook, told me she fears drone-delivered storm warnings could potentially alienate their intended audiences. “Why would you believe the government if it’s dissed the community for this long?” she said, recalling how some Red Hook residents unwisely ignored warnings ahead of Sandy. (One can only imagine the added element of distrust that would come from a drone shouting those same warnings at you.). Cahn, of STOP, was also skeptical of the message’s delivery system: “The idea that you’re going to warn people with a fleet of drones is ludicrous. It’d take hundreds of thousands of drones operating throughout the day to reach the number of people that [NYCEM] can reach through a single text message,” he told me.

That problem of scale is also true after a storm. While I was impressed by the drones’ heat-seeking capabilities — operators could quickly find human actors and mannequins heated to lifelike temperatures during the Staten Island drill — the NYPD only had 85 drones in its arsenal as of this spring. Because connectivity issues are common after major weather disasters, drones cannot travel terribly far from human-toted hotspots, meaning the actual ground drones can cover to look for stranded, trapped, hurt, or drowning New Yorkers is relatively small. Drones also have a limited battery life of about half an hour and must repeatedly return to handlers to have their batteries swapped out as they conduct searches.

Sometimes it seems almost as if the city government is creating problems for drones to solve. A scenario where a window-breaching drone would be more beneficial than having a firefighter simply walk into a building feels like an edge case, and while a drone can inform someone in Mandarin that help is on the way, that “help” still ultimately takes the form of human paramedics, police, or firefighters. Font told me that drones helped supplement the rescue of “multiple drowning victims” in the Rockaways this summer by providing an extra vantage, but the systems were only deployed in the first place because of an unresolved lifeguard shortage. (Though there was excited chatter at the Staten Island drill about drones one day being able to tow distressed swimmers to shore, currently they can only bonk you with a hotdog-sized floatation device that inflates to three feet long to buy first responders some extra time — and that’s if you manage to grab ahold of it while flailing about in rough waters.)

Perhaps the biggest problem the drone exercise appeared poised to address was concerns about whether the city government could continue to function adequately under Adams’ leadership. Though the drill had reportedly been in the works for six months, mounting scandals and resignations in the administration made the large-scale demonstration of interagency cooperation conveniently timed. On Monday, less than a week after the drill, Phil Banks — the deputy mayor for public safety whose phone was seized last month as part of a federal bribery investigation — resigned. His departure leaves a gaping hole in the office that is tasked with coordinating the agencies involved in an extreme weather response, including directly overseeing NYCEM and the FDNY. (Banks reportedly was also at the forefront of promoting the city’s use of “high-tech devices, including drones.)

When I asked Iscol — who has publicly admitted to having had his own conversations about leaving the administration due to the ongoing turmoil — during the drill (i.e. before Banks resigned) whether he was confident that there could still be smooth operations between City Hall and its agencies in the event of a near-term disaster, he told me firmly that he was. “There are 300,000 people that work for the city of New York, and they’re showing up every day,” he told me. “It’s our job to show up and make sure they have the resources and support and the guidance and direction they need to be successful to deliver for New Yorkers.” He emphasized that “it’s business as usual for the agencies,” despite how things look in the headlines.

As for the drones, the commissioner seemed clear-eyed in assessing their usefulness. “As you do things that are new and for the first time, it’s an evolution — you’re always improving,” he told me. Drone advancements are “iterative, kind of like an iPhone,” and he’s aware they’re not all the way there yet. But “it’s not like we’re only using drones,” he stressed. “We’re still taking a multi-channel approach.”

Concerned onlookers will often approach Font, the interagency coordinator, to ask if he’s spying on them when they notice him flying a drone. He told me that he is always eager to show regular New Yorkers how the city is using the technology: “We’re a bunch of tech guys, so we really love getting into the nuts and bolts of it,” he said.

He expects, though, that eventually the questions and suspicious looks will start to taper off. The NYPD and FDNY already use drones in their everyday operations throughout the city; companies like Amazon have also started exploring the use of drones to deliver packages. Drones will become increasingly commonplace as the years wear on. Boring, even! So of course they’ll be used during extreme weather events, too.

“This is the world we live in now,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the resignation of New York Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks.