(Bloomberg) – At a recent apartment blaze in Oakland, California, a sheriff deputy directing firefighters with a drone-mounted video camera encountered a new hazard: a civilian quad copter that buzzed onto the scene.
"It's happened twice in the past few months," said Alameda County Deputy Sheriff Richard Hassna, the department's chief pilot who was using the device. "We're overhead at the scene of a fire relaying information to the command agency and a hobbyist flies right below us and parks."
Related: Evaluation and mitigation of drone-related risks
|Need for 'orderly skies'
Such intrusions — along with fears of drones being used by terrorists — have law enforcement urging that millions of civilian drones be outfitted with radio-tracking devices so they can be identified. The idea is also backed by large commercial users including Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. that want orderly skies in which to operate fleets of flying robots for deliveries.
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