Forest Service Bought Drones To Keep Tabs On Pot Growers, Realized It Couldn't Actually Use Them

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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Forest Service spent $100,000 on two drones to track marijuana growers back in 2006. But because of aviation restrictions and a lack of qualified pilots, the Forest Service has never been able to use those drones, and now they are inoperable and sitting in storage.

On Tuesday, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility released Forest Service documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, that provide insight into the decision to acquire the drones and the setbacks the service's law enforcement division faced in seeking to fly them. The memos show the law enforcement division purchased the aircraft believing -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- there were “no known regulatory barriers” to use of the unmanned aerial vehicles.

"They spent $100,000 before they did any serious planning," said Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director. "They had no plan for deployment, no strategy, no personnel."

The law enforcement division bought the two drones -- one for day surveillance and another for night -- to keep an eye on pot growers in the woods of California. The division hoped the drones would help keep its officers safer by allowing them to monitor growers and assess dangers from a distance.

But once the two SkySeer drones were purchased, barriers began popping up. Crucially, Federal Aviation Administration regulations issued shortly after the purchase barred the use of such drones by anyone without specific authority, which the Forest Service didn't have. The FAA issued revised rules in 2009 that prohibited drone use "except for testing and temporary emergencies such as brush fires," according to a Forest Service memo.

Even if those regulations hadn't grounded the drones, the internal memos reveal that the law enforcement branch had another problem. Two qualified staffers would have been necessary to fly a drone, and the law enforcement division did not have two qualified staffers in the same office.

Forest Service spokeswoman Jennifer Jones told The Huffington Post that the agency's fire and aviation branch was not consulted before its law enforcement division bought the drones. Memos on the "setbacks to implementation" state that the drones were "receiving the latest software updates to improve operational capacity" as they sat in storage. But Jones said the drones "are not even operational at this point," noting that their custom batteries are dead and cannot be replaced.

Despite that bungled foray into drones seven years ago, the Forest Service in 2012 signaled renewed interest in unmanned aircraft when it created an advisory group to explore future uses for drones. FAA regulations still bar the use of drones outside an operator's eyeshot, which rules out a great number of proposed functions at this time. But the FAA is expected to issue new rules that would allow for more use of unmanned aerial vehicles within the next few years.

Jones said that the Forest Service's drone advisory group is still in the preliminary phases of investigating potential uses, such as sampling air quality and combating fires.

The Forest Service has been investigating the firefighting potential of drones for years, though FAA concerns have largely stalled their actual use. Still, state firefighting efforts have employed drones on a limited basis in cases of emergency. As recently as August, the California National Guard deployed drones to fight fires in the Sierra Nevada.

The Forest Service does not plan to undertake wider use of drones until it has a program and policies in place for unmanned aircraft, Jones said.

Back when the agency bought the two SkySeer drones, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) chaired the subcommittee controlling the Forest Service's budget. She was dubious about their utility in combating marijuana growers. "I've provided additional funds to the Forest Service to fight this dangerous epidemic," Feinstein said in a 2008 statement, according to the Associated Press. "But I intend to take a hard look at whether it's appropriate for the Forest Service to buy and operate unmanned aerial vehicles for this purpose."

PEER's Ruch was also skeptical in 2008 when his group first obtained documents revealing the purchase of the drones. He told AP at the time that the drone acquisition was emblematic of a "boys with toys" mentality in the agency's management.

This week Ruch said the aircraft purchase was a symptom of deeper management problems at the agency. "They weren't spending money in the field," he said. "Instead, they were buying fancy gadgets."

Jones, the Forest Service spokeswoman, said that drones are "a new frontier for us in a lot of ways."

"Sometimes what happens is the technology gets out there before our agency policies," she said.

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Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco: 'I Finally Realized That My Story.. Is America'

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MIAMI (AP) — The Miami neighborhood where inaugural poet Richard Blanco grew up, in many ways, resembles Cuba his family left behind. Down the street, a man sells avocados from a small table. His favorite bakery, a few blocks north, serves guava pastries and cafe con leche.

As a child and even as an adult, this was home. But it wasn't necessarily what he imagined as America.

"There's always a little part of you as an immigrant that goes, 'Well, I'm not really American,'" Blanco said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press at his mother's home in Miami. "There's that other little boy on TV or some place I haven't been yet."

That feeling of displacement has been at the crux of his poetry.

When it came to writing the poem for the 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama, however, he was forced to re-examine his own relationship with America and what it meant to be American. Blanco was born 45 years ago in Spain to Cuban immigrants who moved to the United States when he was an infant.

The experience of writing the poem, Blanco said, was transformative.

"I finally realized that my story, my mother's stories, all those millions of stories of faces that were looking at me at the podium, that is America," said Blanco, the nation's first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet. "I finally realized that I'm not the other."

Blanco describes the writing the inaugural poem and two others — and the journey he has embarked on since — in a book, "For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey," recently published by Beacon Press.

Tasked with writing three poems in three weeks, Blanco said he struggled initially on the direction to take. He doesn't know how or why he was chosen though he knew the White House committee's choice was symbolic. He had published three critically acclaimed poetry books but was only modestly known at the time.

He read the work of other inaugural poets such as Maya Angelou and Robert Frost and of others, like Elizabeth Bishop and Pablo Neruda. But by the third day, anxiety began to set in. During mental breaks, he watched reruns of favorite shows like "Bewitched" and the "Brady Bunch," characters who encapsulated his fascination with yesteryear America.

Then came the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that left 26 people dead, 20 of them children.

"The tragedy opened a new emotional and creative pathway for me," writes Blanco, who now lives in Maine. "Writing the inaugural poem wasn't the same assignment anymore. I suddenly understood that as a Cuban-American, I hadn't explored my American side of the hyphen as much as my Cuban side."

He began asking questions, probing his relationship with America: Was this his country? What is the American dream? What was his place in America?

The result were three works: "What We Know of Country," which explores the childlike vision he grew up with of America and the more nuanced one he had come to embrace as an adult; "Mother Country," an autobiographical piece describing his mother's loss of country and discovery of a new one; and "One Today," which describes the mosaic of America, united under "one sky, our sky," and chosen by the White House to be read at the inauguration.

Standing at the podium on that frigid January morning, he said, he felt that the questions he'd been asking were finally resolved, surrounded by politicians, his mother, artists like James Taylor and Beyonce, and the faces of so many Americans who would write him afterward.

"It was such a powerful feeling to be embraced by America in a way I hadn't expected," Blanco said. "I think I finally feel, as I like to say, I discovered home was right here all the time. Home was in my backyard so to speak."

The year since has confirmed that conviction. Blanco travels the country, delivering speeches and readings everywhere from Boston after the marathon bombing, to the Fragrance Foundation Awards and the Northeast Association of Transportation Engineers (Blanco himself has worked throughout his adult life as an engineer while also writing poetry and teaching).

As Blanco says, "The weirder the venue, the more I like doing it."

"I'm excited to explore America and not so much from a first person anymore, but sort of a 'we' voice, which is what the inaugural poem was doing," he said.

Part of his motivation now, he said, is to rekindle the connection he saw Americans experience with poetry when he read at the inauguration.

"A lot of what I've heard back from the inauguration is these faces of surprise," Blanco said. "They're so entrenched still in America (with) this idea that a poem has to be indecipherable and rhyme and be beyond comprehension for it to be a poem. And people are like, is that a poem?"

But if Blanco spoke of Americans united under "one today" in his poem, it's also been one of the most divisive years in memory. Congress remains polarized. The government shut down for the first time in 17 years. And the public has increasingly lost its faith in its elected officials.

"I don't think what we've gone through in the last few years is a great example of being one today," Blanco said. "But sometimes all of that needs to come out of the wash to get there."

Coming back to Miami from his travels and home with his partner in Bethel, Maine, he said, is like returning to "the womb." Photographs of Blanco and his brother, some in the faded pastel hues of decades past, line the wall of a hallway in his mother's duplex.

"It isn't where you're born that matters, it's where you choose to die — that's your country," Blanco quotes his mother in one of the three poems he wrote.

That, Blanco says, is the conclusion he has reached, too.

___

Follow Christine Armario on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cearmario .

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