San Bernardino County Fire Protection District has become California's first fire agency to acquire Seneca's autonomous firefighting drones, ordering a five-aircraft "Strike Team" capable of dropping more than 500 gallons of fire-suppression foam per deployment, the companies announced October 28, 2026.
The package includes five autonomous suppression aircraft, a towable Mobile Air Operations Base, and access to Seneca's autonomy software, which lets a single pilot supervise the entire fleet rather than fly each drone individually. The county department, which protects more than 2 million residents across 20,000 square miles with roughly 1,100 full-time staff, said the aircraft are designed to reach a newly reported fire within five to ten minutes and can fly at night using onboard sensors, conditions that typically ground conventional water-dropping aircraft.
Betting on speed over scale
Fire Chief Dan Munsey framed the acquisition around response time rather than firefighting capacity. "Our goal is to stop 90% of fires before they grow larger than 10 square feet," Munsey said, describing the drones as enabling "autonomous rapid initial attack" that puts suppression material on a fire before it can spread past a contained footprint. That bar is far stricter than the roughly 10-acre threshold many fire agencies use to define a successfully contained fire, reflecting a strategy of hitting ignitions within minutes rather than committing larger air tanker fleets once a fire has already grown.
Seneca, a Sausalito-based resilience technology company led by CEO Stuart Landesberg, demonstrated an earlier version of the system, the Argo-1, in December 2025, using thermal imaging and automated targeting to locate and suppress test fires. "San Bernardino County Fire embodies excellence, a true service mentality, and a history of innovation," Landesberg said. "We are honored to deliver our first system in California to Chief Munsey and his team."
California wildfires have grown costlier and more frequent over the past decade, pushing fire agencies to look beyond traditional engine and air-tanker responses toward technology that can act before a blaze outgrows a single water drop. Other California counties have tested fixed camera networks and expanded night-flying helicopter programs for faster response, but San Bernardino's order marks the first agency contract specifically for an autonomous, foam-delivering aircraft fleet rather than a detection-only system or a crewed-aircraft upgrade.
What happens before next fire season
Neither company disclosed the contract's dollar value. San Bernardino County Fire plans to train crews on the system during the first and second quarters of 2027 and fold it into standard operations ahead of the state's 2027 peak wildfire season. Whether the five-aircraft fleet can reliably hit Munsey's 10-square-foot containment target on an active wildfire, rather than in controlled demonstrations, will be the test once the system goes live.