Williamson County Fire/Rescue announced that a missing person had been located.
A Williamson County Fire/Rescue Facebook post was titled “MISSING PERSON LOCATED.”
Arrington Fire & Rescue
Arrington Fire & Rescue operates from Stations 19 and 20.
Williamson Health EMS runs a sizable operation across the county, employing nearly 200 personnel and operating 18 advanced life support ambulances out of 17 stations, according to Williamson Health.
Williamson County is not the only Middle Tennessee community leaning on drones to speed up searches. In Sumner County, officials say their drone program has logged 15 finds or rescues since it began, per NewsChannel 5. In one case covered by the station, a 4-year-old child went missing in the Flat Ridge area of White House, and drone operators spotted the boy along the bank of a creek. Sumner County Sheriff Eric Craddock said that search located the child within 20 minutes of the drone becoming airborne, and the boy was found roughly an hour after the initial emergency call, cold but unharmed.
About three dozen searchers were part of that Sumner County operation, the station reported, but Craddock said the aerial technology made the difference in how fast the child was found. “A drone can cover more ground in ten minutes than ten searchers on the ground in three hours,” Craddock said, according to NewsChannel 5.
A Growing Tool for Local First Responders
Other Tennessee departments have built out similar programs. The Kingsport Fire Department's drone team, which started in 2018, provides situational awareness and search-and-rescue support for command staff during incidents, according to the City of Kingsport. A separate search result from WKRN indicates Coopertown police also used drone technology to quickly find a child missing from home in a wooded area, though further details of that incident were not available.
Drones have also been used by local agencies in missing-person searches across Tennessee.
