Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins pitched his department’s first drone program to an audience of one resident and one child at a Beacon Hill community meeting on July 22, 2026. The department wants up to three Emergency Response Aerial Technology aircraft, ERAT for short, for building fires, water rescues, hazmat releases, and mass casualty scenes.

The city council and mayor still have to approve the purchase, and the program would launch in 2027 at the earliest. I covered the ERAT proposal when Seattle Fire filed it earlier this month, and the story has since moved from paperwork to people.

Seattle Fire Department chief discussing the proposed ERAT drone program
Photo credit: Seattle Fire Department

Seattle’s surveillance law requires four public sessions plus a comment period that closes August 13. The turnout so far says the city either trusts its fire department completely or is not paying attention at all.

One Resident Heard The Chief Make His Case

Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins hosted the first of four required community meetings on the ERAT drone proposal at El Centro de la Raza’s Centilia Cultural Center on July 22, and the audience for the department’s biggest aerial technology request in years was one community member and one child.

KOMO News reported the attendance figure, and it deserves a second read. Seattle Fire dispatched crews to 108,763 incidents in 2025, and its opening pitch for the tool meant to change how those crews work drew fewer people than a station tour.

Seattle Fire Department chief discussing the proposed ERAT drone program
Photo credit: Seattle Fire Department

Scoggins made the case anyway. “When we can get on scene with better information, we can make real-time decisions that’ll have an impact on a life,” he said, adding that having “this tool at our fingertips for so many of our incident types” would let the department “make a difference every day.”

The room he did get was friendly. Per KOMO’s account, attendees said the technology would help crews spot dangers, and the sharpest question of the night, whether the drones record video, came wrapped in a statement of trust in the department.

The plan Scoggins outlined stations the three aircraft at separate fire stations across the city, with maintenance running about $60,000 a year. The department projects a real workload too: had ERAT existed in 2025, Seattle Fire says it would have flown 2,589 missions, roughly seven flights a day.

Seattle Trails Boston, Denver, And San Francisco By Years

San Francisco, Denver, Oklahoma City, and Boston already operate drones inside their fire departments, which leaves Seattle, a city that houses Amazon and helped define American tech, asking permission in 2026 to buy three aircraft it will not fly before 2027 at the earliest.

The gap is not subtle. The FDNY brought more than 40 drones to an emergency response conference in May 2023, three years before Seattle held its first community meeting about owning any.

When I reported on Seattle Fire’s ERAT filing on July 16, the proposal read as a department moving carefully through a legal process built for police cameras. The meetings add a second reading: Seattle is moving carefully toward equipment its peer cities treated as settled years ago.

The case for the aircraft has not changed. A thermal payload maps heat through smoke over a structure fire and picks out a swimmer’s body heat against cold water at night. It reads a leaking hazmat tank from a standoff distance no firefighter should walk.

Seattle’s filing stacks marine fires, railway incidents, earthquake response, and hazardous energy calls on top of that everyday list. None of it resembles patrol work, which is exactly the distinction the department keeps drawing: ERAT waits in the rig until a call is bad enough to need it.

The Surveillance Ordinance Clock Runs Out August 13

Seattle routes the ERAT proposal through its Surveillance Technology Ordinance, a process that demands a draft Surveillance Impact Report plus four public sessions, with a comment window closing August 13, 2026, before the city council and the mayor vote on whether firefighters get their aerial view.

Two sessions remain. An in-person meeting runs July 30 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the college auditorium on College Way North, and a final Zoom session follows on the morning of August 8.

The department is not making participation hard. The impact report is published in eight languages, interpreters are available on advance notice, and residents can comment through an online survey or by email to the city’s privacy program.

The privacy design has not moved since the filing. ERAT streams live video to designated fire personnel only. Nothing gets recorded. No other city department sees the feed, and neither does the public.

One thing Seattle still has not done is name a manufacturer. The documents describe missions rather than models, and the department has kept the brand question out of every public presentation so far.

DroneXL’s Take

A major American city’s fire department still doesn’t fly a single drone in 2026 and won’t before 2027. I can’t understand it. At DroneXL we write stories every day where cats, dogs, and humans get saved because a thermal drone shows up and saves the mission. In March it was an injured dog pulled from an Oregon pond after a thermal camera found what human eyes could not.

The process itself doesn’t bother me. I made that argument last week: running a rescue tool through a surveillance ordinance is the price of trust, and Seattle chose to earn the yes instead of assuming it. What July 22 exposed is the other half of that bargain. A public process only builds trust if the public shows up, and one resident and a child is not a mandate in any direction. Whether an empty room means confidence or apathy is an open question, not a prediction.

And if Seattle buys DJI, even better. DJI’s enterprise thermal aircraft cost a fraction of what Blue UAS alternatives run, and the ban push against them has always been political, not technical. No fire department should have to sell a truck to afford its drones. DJI isn’t above criticism, and data security questions deserve straight answers, but a fire-only livestream that stores nothing already answers most of them.

The timing is the part to watch. The FCC is taking comment on a proposed sales ban covering foreign thermal and docking drones, and a Seattle purchase that slides deep into 2027 could arrive after the affordable shelf empties. Watch that docket. It may decide what Seattle can buy before Seattle decides to buy anything. Sources: