Webster County sheriff’s deputies in Iowa used a thermal drone to find a driver who had vanished from a crash scene near Harcourt over the weekend. The vehicle was empty when deputies arrived, and the damage was bad enough that they feared the driver had been thrown clear. The drone found the driver quickly, and the driver was not injured.

The frame the sheriff’s office released shows what the deputies saw. Rows of standing crop, corn by the look of the leaves, shot straight down in grayscale, with one body-shaped heat signature between the rows picked out in red. The office released no cause and no road, and it has not said which drone flew or who flew it.

Webster County’s own records answer part of that. The county bought a thermal drone in January 2020 with money from the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the sheriff told voters in 2024 that the office now has three certified pilots.

Dakota Access Pipeline Money Bought Webster County a Thermal Drone in 2020

Dakota Access Pipeline, LLC gave $20,000 to every county emergency management agency on its Iowa route in October 2019. Webster County’s emergency management commission moved on January 16, 2020 to spend its share on a drone with a thermal imaging camera. The low bidder was Alex Air Apparatus.

Emergency Management Coordinator Dylan Hagen told KWBG on October 18, 2019 that the county would buy new equipment, and that it could include a drone with a FLIR thermal camera. The donation came to $360,000 across the route. Three months later the commission’s minutes record three quotes for drones with thermal imaging cameras, a low bid from Alex Air Apparatus of New London, Minnesota, and a motion and second to buy. The minutes name no model and no price.

The drone became a program. By October 2022 the commission’s agenda listed a “Drone Team” among its ongoing projects, next to a storage facility and an ATV. When Sheriff Luke Fleener announced his reelection campaign in January 2024, he told The Messenger the office had partnered with Webster County Emergency Management to create a drone team, with three certified drone pilots on the sheriff’s staff. Fleener was elected in 2020 and took office in January 2021.

Deputy Nick Dunbar Took Up the Drone After the 2013 Kathlynn Shepard Abduction

Deputy Nick Dunbar, the sheriff’s office’s most visible drone pilot, was Dayton’s police chief in 2013 when 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard was abducted and murdered there, and he told The Freeman Journal in November 2024 that the case changed the course of his career.

Dunbar led the local search for Shepard and ran the incident command center for days. Afterward he took the FBI’s Child Abduction Response training in 2020, one of a handful of Iowa officers to do so, and earned his drone pilot’s license so he could fly search and rescue missions. “That incident changed how I perceive my job,” he told the Freeman Journal. The paper reported that he searched the Farnhamville area three times with his drones during the hunt for Michele “Luna” Jackson.

He flies crash scenes too. The Messenger photographed him landing a sheriff’s office drone at a fatal crash on South 32nd Street in Fort Dodge in March 2024. Hagen flies as well, and The Messenger credited him for a drone photo of a Fort Dodge crowd in August 2023.

Iowa Sheriffs Keep Buying the Thermal Drones the FCC Wants to Stop Importing

The Emmet County Sheriff’s Office in northwest Iowa took delivery of two thermal drones the week of October 6, bought with grant money and support from the Estherville Chamber of Commerce and the Emmet County Community Foundation. Story County and Eldora have put theirs to the same use this year.

Emmet County told KTIV the thermal cameras matter most when searching large fields, wooded areas and waterways in the dark. In February a Story County thermal drone, from a team that flies the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced, found an injured man in a ravine south of Story City and relayed his coordinates to paramedics. In June an Eldora police drone with a thermal camera found a felony suspect lying in tall grass within minutes. Harcourt makes three Iowa thermal finds DroneXL has covered since February. Webster County has not named its aircraft, and the January 2020 minutes name only the vendor, so whether the Harcourt search flew the 2020 purchase or a newer drone is the one thing the record does not settle.

The question matters because of what Washington is doing to the supply. The Federal Communications Commission put every foreign-made drone on its Covered List on December 22, 2025, which blocks new DJI models from the equipment authorization they need to be sold in the United States. On July 21 the commission’s bureaus asked whether to bar the import and sale of foreign drones with “military-grade” capabilities, a list that includes any aircraft with a thermal camera, and the Section 232 proclamation has taxed imported drones with integrated thermal imagers at 100 percent since September 3. Weber County Search and Rescue’s Kyle Nordfors told The Hill this month that the US-made drones he has flown cost three to eight times as much and carry weaker thermal sensors.

DroneXL’s Take

A $20,000 check from a pipeline company bought Webster County a thermal camera in the sky in 2020. This weekend that program found someone the deputies thought might be lying dead in a field. I can’t think of a shorter argument for public safety drones than that.

Iowans are not soft on surveillance. Last month someone put a large-caliber round through a county construction camera near the Fort Dodge airport, and a week later it was vandalized again, because websites listed it as a Flock license plate reader. Fleener had to tell The Messenger that his office runs no plate readers at all. A drone looking straight down at a field for a crash victim is the use none of those people object to, and the FCC’s thermal-drone proposal lands on exactly that camera.

I don’t know whether the aircraft over Harcourt was the 2020 purchase or something newer, because the sheriff’s office has not said. Either way the next one costs more. If the FCC adopts its July proposal, thermal-drone imports stop after the wind-down it proposed, and the next county that spends a pipeline-sized donation gets a weaker camera for the money.

Sources: Iowa Pulse, KWBG, Webster County Emergency Management Commission minutes, January 16, 2020, Webster County Emergency Management Commission agenda, October 20, 2022, The Messenger, The Freeman Journal, Northwest Iowa Now, Webster County Sheriff’s Office

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.