Coimbatore: The Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation, jointly with city-based Cymatics, has conducted a thermal drone survey at Vellalore dump yard to detect temperature changes and help prevent fire incidents by identifying hotspots within the dump yard on a pilot basis.
CEO of Cymatics L Gopinath said, “We initiated this programme following the massive fire in 2024 that lasted for at least 12 days. This survey provides a 90-95% accuracy rate for identified hotspots, verified against real-time thermal data at those specific locations. It has also developed a separate dashboard that provides visualisations, historical data, and animations of hotspot locations, complete with longitude and latitude coordinates. During the summer, we conduct surveys of the dump yard two to three times a week, depending on daytime temperatures. If temperatures rise, we increase monitoring to alternate days. The software we designed will also indicate whether a hotspot is a recurring location or a new one based on the historical data we’ve compiled. “In some cases, when hotspots were detected by the drone, we discovered mild fires within the legacy waste when it was excavated.