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’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.
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.”…