Drones to help rescuers

Posted on: Sep. 3rd, 2005 || Source: cnn.com | E-mail Article | Print Article

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) -- Unmanned remote-controlled airplanes used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may be deployed to find people trapped in New Orleans' buildings by Hurricane Katrina's flood waters, a U.S. congressman said Friday.

Five Silver Fox "unmanned aerial vehicles," or UAVs, equipped with thermal imaging technology to detect the body heat of storm survivors, are en route to the crippled city, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Curt Weldon said.

Weldon told reporters in Baton Rouge that he had bypassed government bureaucracy to obtain the drones from a private company to be used in search and rescue operations in New Orleans, scene of one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

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