A mountain of rubble hiding flattened homes.
A roaring inferno sweeping through a forest.
Wailing sirens mingling with cries for help. And people, armed and ready, rushing into the flames.
This could be the wildfires of California, 2024.
The tsunami-hit city of Alexandria in 4th century CE Egypt.
Or the cities of Mandalay and Sagaing last year, after the 7.7-magnitude earthquake in Myanmar.
Across history, catastrophe has been one of humanity’s constants.
As the earth heaved and storms swept through settlements, humans learnt to rely on people who charge towards the chaos when everyone else is running the other way; dig through debris; row into a flooded and silent city, carrying supplies and medicines and looking for signs of life.
For centuries, a certain kind of person has signed up for this role. Now, the world of these first-responders is changing.
As storms, heatwaves, wildfires, floods and cold snaps intensify and become more frequent, new technology is emerging to help them on the ground: slinky robots that can slither through crevices; large ones that can ferry stretchers; drones that can map terrain.
But the aftermath for rescuers is becoming harder to navigate too. Some are reporting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder year after year, as weather-related disasters slam into their regions. Others are suffering from palpitations, nightmares and emotional detachment.
In attempts to address this, support groups are emerging in countries such as Sweden and Iceland. “Sometimes it’s as simple as a unit heading to a sauna together. Even if only one person really needs to talk, everyone will go along so the person could open up in a relaxing, supportive environment,” says Petur Gudmundsson, a firefighter from Stockholm. (Read the stories alongside for more on the new technology and the efforts at support.)
Meanwhile, a quick look back.
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Organised disaster response is ancient. In the 1st century CE, the Roman emperor Augustus formed a group of men, the Vigiles, whose job was to patrol the streets, on the lookout for fires in Rome’s densely populated cities. They then worked together to tackle flames, using pumps, buckets, poles and hooks.
Before this, the Greek-Egyptian mathematician Ctesibius, in Alexandria, is credited with inventing the first fire pump, a hand-operated, twin-cylinder machine, in the 3rd century BCE.
By the 11th century CE, China had a professional fire brigade set up under Emperor Renzong, with personnel allotted specific duties such as extinguishing flames, maintaining law and order, salvaging precious possessions, and administering first-aid. By the 13th century, this force in modern-day Hangzhou had grown to more than 5,000, and encompassed 10 watchtowers.
In the modern era, global bodies such as the United Nations Disaster Relief Office (set up in 1971), the Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (since 1971) and the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction have helped shape aid distribution, early-warning systems, preparedness and response.
By 1995, robots were being experimented with, amid the unstable rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing in the US and the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Shoebox-sized variants would later be used at the twin towers after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, after the Tohoku tsunami in Japan in 2011, and in the wake of the Mexico City earthquake in 2017.
As protocols improve, the number of deaths from natural disasters has fallen, from over 50,000 a year in the 1970s to less than 20,000 a year in the 2010s, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s WMO Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970-2019). (This despite the boom in populations and urban density; global population has grown, for context, from 3.7 billion to over 7.8 billion in this time).
In a corresponding statistic that India is justifiably proud of, while about 10,000 people tragically died in the 1999 Odisha super-cyclone, the toll was just 64 in May 2019, when Fani, a rare summer cyclone and one of the fiercest on record, hit the eastern state.
“Our response forces are now called upon by other countries such as Sri Lanka (after Cyclone Ditwah, 2025) and Myanmar (after the 2025 earthquake and 2024 Typhoon Yagi),” says Anil Kumar Gupta, a strategic consultant on disaster resilience, and a professor with the Integrated Centre for Adaptation to Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction and Sustainability (ICARS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Roorkee.
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We’ll have to pat ourselves on the back rather quickly and keep moving.
It will take new technology, new approaches, and even more rapid response to tackle intensifying natural disasters as their numbers climb.
From 350 to 500 medium-to-large-scale disasters a year over the past two decades, there are estimated to be 560 a year by 2030, according to the 2022 Global Assessment Report, released by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).
In Italy, a giant icebox is helping first-responders train.
In the US, France and India, new robots and drones are being built.
In California, a startup called Rain is testing AI-guided autonomous aircraft that create their own flight plans, lift their own water and aim to put out wildfires in their earliest stages.
What of the men and women at the frontlines amid all this? Read on for more on how disasters are being tackled differently, and what life is like after the flames have been put out.
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SIM CITY: TRAINING FOR EXTREMES INSIDE A CLIMATE SIMULATOR IN ITALY
It’s a bit like walking into a giant, noisy freezer.
Except, instead of pantry staples, one may choose between a range of life-threatening disaster scenarios: blizzards, avalanches, icy slopes, a thunderstorm and rain.
Temperatures can drop to -40 degrees Celsius and rise to 60 degrees Celsius. Snow, wind and rain can be programmed to whip through at varying speeds. The air can be engineered to have the effect, on the human body, of plodding at an altitude of 9,000 metres, complete with drops in air pressure and oxygen levels.
This is terraXcube, an extreme-climate simulation centre in Bolzano, Italy, where first-responders are training for the region’s intensifying superstorms.
The lab is the brainchild of Hermann Brugger, a physician and founder of the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine at Eurac Research.
As a mountaineer and researcher for over 40 years, he knew how difficult it was to train for something like emergency medical care at high altitude in a super-blizzard. For years, he looked for a solution. What kind of environment would be safe and controlled but could also simulate how variable and extreme the weather in the Dolomites and Alps can now be?
Eventually, he and other engineers and researchers at Eurac Research designed and built terraXcube. The 1,270-sq-ft facility, home to six chambers of varying sizes, opened in 2019.
Wall treadmills, textured mats and portable ramps help create slopes, while audio and video projection systems complete the experience. In addition to training mountain rescuers, emergency medical personnel, engineers, pilots and anyone operating at extreme heights, the labs are also being used to test machines, materials and industrial prototypes.
First-responder training sessions involve people or mannequins who need to be spotted, moved to safety and revived. “Rescuers have to assess the situation, do an initial check, stabilise the patient if needed and move them, all while battling Alpine-storm conditions,” says Christian Steurer, head of operations at terraXcube. “If there is any indication of a health risk, the control room can quickly dial back the conditions and attend to the trainees.”
So far, about 100 first-responders have trained at the lab, Steurer says; the private facility is open to clients around the world, and costs the equivalent of ₹2 lakh per day for the largest chamber.
Meanwhile, these simulations are throwing up interesting findings that could help in unforeseen ways. The prevalence of white in medical machinery, for instance, has been found to pose an issue; these instruments can easily be lost in the snow. Brighter, neon covers are now being used locally, Steurer says. Plastic coating may also need to be reinforced on machines such as respirators, to keep them operational when temperatures dip well below zero.
The cube is offering lessons in communication too. “Rescuers operate under extreme stress. At the climate simulator, they can train for that in a safe way, experiment and establish a chain of command, factor in agitation, and repeat this again and again. That’s the coolest thing,” Steurer says.
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RAISING A ROBOT ARMY IN US, EUROPE, JAPAN
It looks like a cross between a balloon animal and a firefighter’s water hose.
The inflatable tube is controlled via joystick and can be sent into rubble through a narrow crack, from where it can continue to squeeze through small spaces and bend around corners, inflating and deflating as needed. One end of the tube features a camera and sensors that give operators access to a live feed.
The Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit, or SPROUT, created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT’s) Lincoln Laboratory, could be a leap forward in rescue operations at collapsed structures.
Existing robots have, of course, been used since the early Aughts, to identify heat signatures and find survivors; deliver food, water and medicine; and offer views of what lies beneath the rubble. But all these bots need two things: access holes big enough to fit through, and clear routes within.
Rescuers can spend precious hours figuring out how to blast those access holes; and things can still go very wrong. Once inside, the bots’ movements remain restricted and cumbersome.
Sprout changes this. Its soft, tubular body can scale walls and slither. It can help rescuers figure out how to proceed by reporting on the presence of victims as well as of reinforced concrete, steel or live power lines.
The robot, developed in collaboration with researchers at University of Notre Dame, has already been tested at a Massachusetts Task Force 1 training site, says project lead Nathaniel Hanson. “In the next phase, we’re trying to make it more agile and sturdy,” he adds.
ANIMAL INSTINCTS
Sprout isn’t the only one.
A group of scientists from eight countries — UK, Greece, Austria, Ireland, France, Norway, Japan and Germany — have created the Soft Miniaturised Underground Robotic Finder, or SMURF, to serve a similar purpose. The light, two-wheeled, remote-controlled robot can navigate rubble to help operators visualise and map a disaster site.
In addition to cameras, microphones and speakers, its head is also fitted with a powerful chemical sensor called the Sniffer. This lets Smurf scan the air for volatile organic compounds such as carbon dioxide and ammonia, emitted by human beings.
In doing so, it can help distinguish between living and deceased individuals, allowing first-responders to prioritise rescue, says Tiina Ristmae, a research coordinator with the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief, which coordinated the project.
In trials conducted in Japan and parts of Europe, the Sniffer provided accurate readings on trapped victims even amid smoke and rain, Ristmae adds.
“This technology is not aimed at replacing dogs or other existing protocols; it can act as an additional aid to speed up and make rescue more efficient. Dogs can further confirm Smurf findings, and the robots can be sent in again and again, even when the dogs cannot,” she says.
Some members of this team are now working on a quadrupedal robot, ANYmal, that would carry small indoor drones for situational assessment and mapping, a robotic arm to open doors and turn off valves, and a set of visual and thermal cameras.
And the team is working on Snake, a robotic device that can be used to detect signs of life in narrow spaces and voids amid rubble, equipped with multiple cameras and sensors that can monitor environmental gasses.
“The idea,” Ristmäe says, “is to create an arsenal of robots that can help first-responders assess threats in the environment, damage, and structural stability from a safe distance.”
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THROUGH THE SMOKE: LAKES IN THE AIR IN THE US
Why can’t we get to forest fires before they become the blazes that are so hard to control?
That’s a question that has haunted California-based entrepreneur Maxwell Brodie.
Finally, as the wildfires grew in frequency and intensity — the past five years have been labelled the most extreme on record, with at least 13.5 million hectares of forest area lost around the world in 2024 alone — Brodie decided to act on an idea that had been taking shape in his mind.
His startup, Rain, draws on information from the thousands of fire-detection cameras across western USA, and links them with a select set of aircraft that have been fitted with AI-based autopilot software. When the cameras detect flames, the plan is for these prepositioned aircraft take off autonomously, lift water from designated water bodies, and head to the flames to put them out.
Since 2023, Rain has worked with the US defence and aerospace manufacturer Sikorsky to demonstrate the autonomous capacity required to position such aircraft in remote areas, based on assessments of wildfire risk.
The system supports both crewed and uncrewed missions, Brodie says. The aim is to help firefighters “with new tools to address the increase in frequency and severity of these catastrophic events,” he adds.
Rain is still in the operational demonstration phase and is being tested by fire departments in the region.
RELYING ON PAM
NASA is working on something similar too.
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is developing airspace management technology that could allow firefighting agencies to use drones and helicopters fitted with autonomous piloting technology. The hope is that this will allow first-responders to monitor and fight wildfires even amid low-visibility, especially at night.
NASA’s Portable Airspace Management System or PAMS would act as a sort of suitcase-sized air traffic control kit, allowing unmanned craft to do the job when humans cannot, and aiding human efforts.
Each PAMS unit will consist of a flight tracker, a radio to communicate with units within the network, and a broadcast receiver for communication with other nearby craft, to avoid collisions.
Each drones or helicopter operating within the Pams network would register its flight plan, operational intent and positional data with the management system in real-time, and then get to work.
“We’ve conducted successful trials but we’re working on more,” says Min Xue, project manager of the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project, under which PAMS was developed. “We’re also focusing on how to place this technology in the hands of firefighters.”
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A RHYNO, A FAUX SHARK, A RUBBLE LEADER TO THE RESCUE
India is also focusing on rescue robots and technology that can aid first-responders.
* Last year, the Telangana government’s disaster response department added a new member to its fleet: The Rhyno.
Standing 3.7 ft tall, the robot (shaped like a tiny military tank) can help extinguish fires with a 1,000-litre-per-minute water cannon, is resistant to temperatures of up to 900 degrees Celsius, and can climb a 40-degree slope and navigate stairs.
It can be operated by firefighters from a distance, and is fitted with thermal cameras. It can carry equipment weighing up to 100 kg, and be fitted with stretcher-carriers. It was developed by the French company Shark Robotics. Rhyno has been used in operations in Hyderabad.
* In Maharashtra, the Indian Rescue Academy, a privately run disaster-response training institute set up in 2014, has developed a remote-controlled water drone with a double-jet propulsion system that lets it glide through water to rescue stranded victims and tow them to safety. It can reach speeds of 20 knots, and navigate waves up to 4 ft high.
Since its launch in 2023, it has been used to aid rescue and relief efforts in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh. “It not only saves rescue time, it also helps safeguard rescuers, especially in choppy flood waters where it’s too dangerous for even a rescuer,” says PB Bharath Kumar, assistant vice-president of the Academy.
* On the excavation-rescue front, the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) has developed a real-time mapping solution called UbiqMap that uses readings from rescuers’ body cameras and radio-wave readings from their walkie-talkies to build a chart of any given indoor terrain.
A reduction in radio signal power, for instance, is analysed to determine whether the obstruction causing it is made of wood or concrete or steel, says Ayon Chakraborty, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at IIT-M. “This can help first-responders more quickly plan their next course of action.”
As cameras and radios carried by multiple rescuers yield readings, the centralised system can update the map in real time. “We are currently in the process of prototyping a wearable version of the technology to prepare for field trials,” Chakraborty says.
