In June local emergency personnel responded to a call of an elderly woman possibly suffering from dementia who was missing from her rural home south of Pipestone. It was night, it was dark and it was feared that the woman might be in danger.
This photo of flooding on 160th Avenue near Hatfield was taken by the Pipestone County Sheriff’s Office’s drone in early July.
Around 20 or 30 people with the Sheriff’s Office, Pipestone Fire Department and Pipestone County Emergency Management joined in the search. Among them was Edison Dengler, Pipestone County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant, who used the department’s new drone and its thermal imaging ability to search from the sky.
“We were able to use the drone to fly about a two or three mile area and we could pick out some hot spots from the air and direct individuals on ATVs,” Dengler said.
A “hot spot” is an area picked up with the thermal imaging camera where there is a higher temperature that could indicate a living body.
“Right then the beans were starting to get tall enough where if someone was laying in the beans, you wouldn’t see them and so using the thermal camera, the thermal imaging, we were able to fly the fields and you could actually see right through the beans,” Dengler said.
This image of a vehicle on a rural road was captured with the thermal imaging camera during a test flight of the drone owned by the Pipestone County Sheriff’s Office.
Dengler guided the search crew on the ground to the hot spots detected by the drone. At least one of those hot spots turned out to be an animal that Dengler could see darting off as someone approached it on a four wheeler. In the end, emergency responders found the woman safe and sound in a vehicle on a nearby property.
Dengler said the search team did not find the woman with the drone, but that it did speed up the search process.
“We were able to cover a gigantic area because I could fly a bean field surrounding the area that she was missing from and I could tell you there’s definitely nothing in this field,” Dengler said. “We can cross that off our map and we can move on to another area.”
Dengler said the drone has been used eight times since the Sheriff’s Office purchased it for $15,647 earlier this year using donations from Pipestone Systems, Sioux Valley Energy and the Pipestone Jaycees. He said it’s been used to search for a suicidal individual and someone seen walking along the highway who looked like they might need help, and to survey flooding that occurred in Pipestone and Murray counties. In one case, they used it to inspect the dam at Split Rock Creek State Park.
“We had some other counties call us and said that they heard there were some issues with the dam in Ihlen, so we went down there and we flew around the lake and the dam and followed it all the way down to Jasper and basically found that there were no issues,” Dengler said.
He said the drone has been and will be a “great asset” to the community.
“I’m sure it will save a life at some point and the little bit of money that is invested in it through the community will be well worth it,” Dengler said.
He said the Sheriff’s Office recently received a $5,000 grant from BNSF Railway for the drone program that it might use to purchase a second, more compact drone that only has a regular camera, and to send more officers to training to obtain their Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Remote Pilot Certification.
Currently Dengler and Deputy Derek Claar are the only two licensed to fly the drone.
“So far if it’s been needed one of us has always been around,” Dengler said.
