By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill

A catastrophic flash flood, which inundated a large swath of the Central Texas Hill Country in the early-morning hours of July 4, 2025, claimed the lives 135 people, a total that officials have said could have been much lower had an early-warning system been in place. 

Now a Texas-based research and development start-up is offering a solution to help mitigate similar tragedies in the future, one that combines tapping into communities’ existing communications infrastructure with advanced drone-in-a-box technology.

Gale Project Technologies, which unveiled its  small-UAS docking system in November, has begun marketing its technology to communities in the U.S. and overseas, CEO  Jay Kriner told DroneLife.

Kriner said he recently met in San Antonio with officials of the Texas Department of Transportation (TexDOT), as well as police, emergency rescue and hazmat officials representing the city and Bexar County, to discuss the possibility of implementing Gale’s early-warning system in the region.

The assembled officials, including representatives of other municipalities in the San Antonio area, were impressed with the presentation of Gale’s technology, he said. “They all were like, ‘Hey, this is a solution. This is going to be the future because it’s so simple.’”

Kriner said the company has also received expressions of interest from officials in the U.K. and elsewhere in the world. “There’re some folks in Bangladesh that would like to have this as a smart infrastructure for the entire country,” he said.

The main component of the Gale remote-monitoring and emergency-response system is a drone dock that is mounted on a pole or mast. The UAS-agnostic dock features a scalable open-source modular design and is equipped with an HD camera featuring built-in artificial intelligence (AI) for real-time data analysis and recognition, as well as environmental monitoring sensors.

Gale’s system builds on the drone-in-a-box concept employed by many public service agencies as part of their drone-as-first-responder programs. The company’s main innovation was in siting the docking stations high up on utility poles or masts where they wouldn’t be susceptible to flooding or tampering.

“If it’s on the ground, it has limited capability; it only opens and closes. That’s all it really does. What else can we do beyond that?” he asked. Elevating the docking station opened up the potential for the system to be put to a wide variety of uses, such as serving as early-warning system to alert communities of impending disasters, Kriner said.

“So, we incorporated a camera system or multiple different variations that allow us to monitor areas. And because of the advancements in AI, that camera system’s vision really opens the door for a lot more use cases,” he said. 

Had it been in place earlier this year, such a monitoring system could have proved invaluable during the Hill Country floods, by providing early warning of flash flooding, potentially saving a number of lives.

“Our camera system can monitor autonomously. If there are flash floods coming, if there is a water level rise it can detect it,” he said. The system could also provide real-time data to aid first responders in traffic control and incident management at the site of an emergency situation. “When that event starts to happen, other first responders or say a 911 control center can be monitoring the situation and say, ‘Let’s remotely deploy the drone as first responder to further investigate.”

Kriner said advances is the use of drones as first responders have opened up a wide range of disaster response possibilities for the UAVs positioned in the Gale docks. “Some of these drones have payload capabilities for even a life jacket or other lifesaving measures,” he said. The system’s design also allows the UAVs to go from being the first responders to an incident scene to site investigators at the scene.

System adapts to multitude of municipal uses 

The docking system can be tied directly into a community’s existing emergency communications infrastructure, which opens up the potential for it to be put to a number of tasks, to fit the needs of the individual community. For example, in large jurisdictions, docking stations can be widely spread out to cover remote areas.

“Because of the budgetary constraints of a lot of municipalities, they might not say, “Hey, we have enough resources that can get across our county in 10 minutes or 20 minutes,” Kriner said. “We kind of chop that down by saying if our system was out there remotely, we can not only monitor, but we can respond. And that was a big impact.”

In addition, by interspersing its drone docks across a wide area, the system could allow a large county to dispatch a drone to perform routine maintenance tasks, such as infrastructure inspection or utility pole inspection, which otherwise would have required a worker to drive to the site.

Kriner said the Gale system is designed to be able to seamlessly connect into a community’s existing emergency communication infrastructure. For example, the Gale docking stations operate using ethernet connectivity, the same system employed by municipally operated traffic-camera systems.

“You do not have to have another platform, another software integration. It is literally a plug-and-play,” he said. “And it just ties directly in what they have, without having to change much in the backend.”

Based on the feedback from potential customers, Gale also can custom design a system tailored to meet an individual community’s needs. “Some folks don’t all want the drone deployment capability. Maybe they only want it on a couple poles, just the camera, the speaker system and some weather-monitoring,” he said.

Kriner said the systems are designed in such a way that they can first be installed as an early-monitoring station only, with the capability to support a drone pod at a later date.

“That’s why our system’s modular. What they are more interested in is just how they can tie it directly into their current systems,” he said. “They already have the software; they already have the infrastructure there. Their cameras were already outdated and they’re looking for a new solution. That’s where we come in.”

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

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