Imagine a train with rail cars filled with thousands of drones that are programmed to fly buckets out to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up water, and drop on brush fires. The train goes along the California coast to where its needed and releases the drones. Diesel generators provide battery charging.

If each drone costs $1000, even a million drones would cost only $1 billion. That isn’t that much, when neighborhoods of $5 million homes are at stake.

China can choreograph thousands of drones to put on a light show of a dragon flying over a city, so why can’t we program drones to put out a fire?