Smoke Doesn’t Deter Map Maker

Timothy Hagel is a cartographer.

But he can draw a pistol better than he can draw the contours of Ventura County. In fact, the Ventura County sheriff’s deputy has no formal training in the traditional art of map making.

Yet, his skill with a computer program aboard a Sheriff’s Department helicopter proved invaluable Monday in battling the fire racing across the county.

Armed with a Nintendo-like joystick and sitting atop enough computer and video equipment to stock an electronics store’s Fourth of July sale, Hagel provided firefighters with the exact topography and the hottest spots of the blaze.

He was able to do so with the high-tech combination of an infrared camera and a $15,000 map-making computer program, which creates instant, Thomas Guide-like maps as the helicopter flies over the county.

About 10 a.m. Monday--as lawyers in suits, criminal defendants and others with business at the Ventura County Government Center looked on--pilot Michael Mason softly landed the two-seat chopper on the center’s front lawn.

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While Hagel adjusted and tuned the computer equipment, Mason hurried into the Public Works Department and spent less than an hour transferring topography information onto a floppy disk containing one-dimensional street maps.

“What used to take days we can now do in an hour,” Hagel said.

As Mason was plugging into the Public Works Department computers, Hagel treated the curious to a demonstration of the chopper’s electronic power. After slapping a videotape into a small VCR, images of nothing more than gray smoke were visible on the screen.

“That’s the color camera,” Hagel said. “Now watch what happens when we switch to the infrared.”

With that, the smoky images on the color screen turned clear and all of the hot spots in the canyon below, which resembled a moonscape as seen by the infrared camera, were clearly visible.

“The infrared cuts right through the smoke,” Hagel said.

The county bought the camera about two years ago and added the map-making program last year. Hagel said the Ventura County and Los Angeles County sheriff’s departments are the only agencies in the state that have this type of technology, which is gleaned from the military.

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The map-making device displays a Thomas Guide map page on the helicopter’s monitor. It shows the helicopter’s location and destination while computing its estimated time of arrival.

The camera and map maker have been used to track several smaller fires in the last year, and police and rescue agencies throughout the county can use the chopper, Hagel said.

Police use the helicopter to help with pursuits and finding hidden fugitives, whose body heat betrays their hiding places to the camera. The helicopter has also been used to find missing hikers in the county’s rugged foothills and boaters clinging to life rafts in the ocean, Hagel said.

“It’s amazing what we have up there,” Hagel said. “I don’t know how we got by without these things in the first place.”