KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Over the weekend, the Kansas City Fire Department put its remote-controlled tracked robot into service for the first time. Fire officials say this new resource will save time, resources, and lives. It can produce upwards of 2,500 gallons a minute through multiple supply lines. “To give you some perspective, a hand line that a firefighter is holding, you're getting about 150 to 170 gallons a minute. So that's quite a bit of water we can float through. It’ll help us out in a lot of different ways,” said KCFD Battalion Chief Michael Hopkins. KCFD used the robot on Saturday while working a fire at the Batliner Recycling Facility. Campfire cause of 200-acre grassfire in Douglas County "We use two-and-a-half-inch hand lines on large fires at eight and a half pounds per gallon. When you're dragging those around, it takes quite a few people. So as soon as we put this into play, we were able to put three companies back in service to service the city in other needs,” Hopkins explained. It's equipped with thermal imaging and multiple cameras. The mounted front blade and tracked mobility came in handy Saturday as firefighters faced mud and piles of debris. “We deployed this apparatus that was able to drive through all of that with ease and kept our firefighters out of that mud and muck and chemicals and anything that might have been in that debris pile,” Hopkins said. Kansas City is one of only a handful of fire departments nationwide utilizing a remote-controlled tracked robot. “This allows us to get into places such as underground caves, which we have many here in the City that are commercial use, large industrial areas, or as we saw on Saturday, in an area where we have things burning that are not necessarily good for us to be in, we can deploy this and protect our firefighters,” Hopkins explained. ‘We didn’t get justice’: Family reacts to no charges in IPD shooting deaths Hopkins said the protection and safety it offers firefighters is a big plus. “There are so many areas that it's not safe to put a firefighter, but we need that water coverage, and this apparatus will give us that opportunity to do that,” he said. The firefighting robot is another resource continuing KCFD’s history of leading the way in firefighting technologies. “If you track our history back to the beginnings. Chief Hale, one of our first Chiefs, was an innovator. A lot of the modern fire appliances and stuff of that time were created here in KCFD. So this, along with our drone program and other things that we're doing, keeps us on that leading edge, something we’ve been doing our entire history,” Hopkins said. ...read more read less