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A California tech company is facing an uproar from local residents and elected officials after launching a drone near the small Alaska fishing town of Homer with a goal fit for a sci-fi novel: to create rain and snow.
The company, Rainmaker Technology Corp., says it produced 19 million gallons of water in the sky near Homer in about three hours Aug. 23 by dispersing a small amount of silver iodide — a chemical that induces precipitation under the right atmospheric conditions — from a drone.
It was a training run for a company whose mission is to alleviate water scarcity in drought-stricken areas and ultimately to make the planet more habitable as it warms.
Rainmaker says it received the necessary regulatory approvals and notified state officials before launching its operation. But local representatives say they learned about the test after the fact — and that many of their constituents, even those typically divided over politics, are united in concern.
“The fact that these guys are literally dropping materials on constituents without any notification or checklist of what should occur prior to the flight is clearly a gap in responsible lawmaking,” said Peter Micciche, the mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.
The issue has generated one of the largest outpourings of local opposition “in a very, very long time,” said state Rep. Sarah Vance, a Republican who represents Homer and its surroundings.
Vance sent a letter this week to Rainmaker asking it to “cease and desist” its operations in her district. She also asked that the company hold a public open house.
Rainmaker mainly operates in the Lower 48, where it’s trying to revive Utah’s Great Salt Lake, save the Colorado River and help snow-starved ski resorts stay in business. Its work is known as cloud seeding, one of several technologies that startups are promoting as scientists and investors look for ways to blunt the impacts of global climate change.
The company came to Alaska just to test its process, which works only when clouds are cold enough for ice to form around the silver iodide particles, according to the company’s chief executive, Augustus Doricko.
But cloud seeding also has potential uses — enhancing hydropower and protecting glaciers — that are “immediately relevant to Alaska,” said Doricko, 26.
The company launched a drone from two sites near the head of Kachemak Bay, some 20 miles northeast of Homer.
The drone was about the size of a lawn mower, Doricko said. It held several small flares. Once it reached a certain elevation — thousands of feet in the air, in the middle of a supercool cloud — the flares combusted and released silver iodide dust into the air, Doricko said.
In total, the company dispersed some 375 grams of silver iodide — a little less than a pound — over a wide area, according to a technical corporate report. Doricko asserted that the chemical is totally safe at those levels; the resulting increase in silver concentrations on the ground is orders of magnitude less than the 100 parts per billion threshold set by the Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water, he said.
“In a certain sense, I am running a conservation company, or at least a company that’s trying to make our ecosystems and our farms healthier, and more green,” Doricko said. “So, it would be pretty ridiculous if I was using something that acted to the contrary of that.”
Micciche, the mayor, said he’s not especially concerned about silver iodide.
“But the fact that someone can drop something from a drone on my constituency without any prior notification or public comment, in my view, is inadequate,” he said.
“The contrail people are saying, ‘See, I told you so.’ But it’s the other 85% of the population that’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t drop things on my neighbors without public notice… or some sort of permit,’” Micciche added.
Micciche said he plans to introduce a resolution and ordinance at the next borough assembly meeting, with the intent to increase local oversight over cloud-seeding.
The issue has struck a chord not only in conservative circles and among politicians like Micciche and Vance, but also among local environmental advocates.
Cooper Freeman, a Homer resident and Alaska director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national conservation group, said he has concerns, too.
“At best, it’s absolutely bizarre,” Freeman said in a text message. “At worst, it’s a dangerous and potentially toxic false solution to addressing the severe climate disruption facing the state.”
Meanwhile, Vance, the state legislator, said she is pushing Rainmaker for an open house so they can explain their technology and hear directly from the public.
She said her constituents “don’t want weather modification over our skies or in our skies.”
Doricko said he understands the concerns.
“I’m really empathetic to people that have questions about what we’re doing, right? You hear about a tech company with a mulleted CEO that’s in his 20s, that’s modifying the weather. That should absolutely raise eyebrows,” he said.
But Doricko added that companies have tested cloud-seeding technology for decades — though experts also have long questioned its effectiveness. And he said that even though 19 million gallons of water sounds like a lot — and could provide drinking water to more than 150 households for a year — it’s not enough to create a “torrential downpour” or blizzard. That amount equates to about 0.01 of an inch of rain across 100 square miles.
Rainmaker is not planning another test in Alaska next summer, Doricko added. But the company is working to schedule a town hall.
“We absolutely have to talk to the folks before we operate, and we did, and we got those approvals,” he said.
He said Rainmaker notified the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and reached out to the region’s Alaska Native corporation and a local tribal government. The company also received approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration.
A document that Rainmaker says it presented to state land managers — and that the company shared with the Anchorage Press — describes plans to “conduct atmospheric data collection, cloud seeding feasibility assessments, and precipitation enhancement research via Aerosol Dispersal System (ADS) and silver iodide (AgI) flare dispersal at altitude.”
After meeting with company representatives, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources issued a letter to Rainmaker noting that the use of a drone for research is a generally allowed use on state land, meaning it does not require a permit.
The agency does not have jurisdiction over cloud-seeding, and did not issue any specific authorization for it, according to spokesperson Lorraine Henry.
Another state regulatory agency, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, “is aware of Rainmaker’s reported activity and is reviewing the available information in coordination with other state agencies,” Sam Dapcevich, an agency spokesperson, said in an email.
“A more thorough response with our evaluation will follow in the coming days,” he added.
Doricko, for his part, said he’s “absolutely down” to do more outreach in the future.
He just insisted on one thing for the town hall: metal detectors at the door.