Statewide Iowa — The Iowa State Patrol is unveiling a squadron of drones that can help minimize highway disruptions and provide quicker clearance of crash scenes.
Troopers are incorporating a new Small Unmanned Aircraft System into their technical crash investigation program. State Patrol Sergeant Alex Dinkla says their current technology does a good job of documenting a crash scene, but the drone system can do it faster.
Dinkla says the pictures the drones take are all meshed together to create a 3-D rendering of the crash scene to scale.
Trooper Mark Anderson, of the patrol’s Fort Dodge office, is one of eight full-time collision reconstructionists who are assigned to use the new technology. He says once he arrives at a crash scene, he can start documenting things.
Anderson says crash scene investigations have come a long ways from using tape measures to now using drones.
Two of the new drones will be implemented in each quadrant in the state.
