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New gel lets us spread flame retardant before wildfires start
The last few years have seen horrific fire seasons in California, resulting in destruction, deaths, and economic damage. And with climate change continuing unabated, things are set to get worse.
Prevention is better than firefighting; avoiding carelessness is one way to reduce the huge number of human-caused wildfires. But a paper in PNAS this week reports a new option for wildfire prevention: a fire retardant-carrying gel that coats vegetation in a thin film, keeping that vegetation safe from fire long enough to see it through fire season. If it is demonstrated to be safe, it could allow us to spray high-risk areas at the start of fire season and keep protection through until heavy rains start.
[...] Stanford materials scientist Anthony Yu and his colleagues wanted to figure out a way to get a retardant to stick to vegetation long enough to make it through California's fire season. They used nontoxic substances that are used in food and agricultural products—silica and cellulose—to make a carrier for a fire retardant that's already used in current formulations. The new gel makes the retardant stick to the vegetation for longer periods of time.
[...] The gel's longevity means that it could be sprayed at the start of wildfire season, and last long enough to offer protection until the first heavy rainfall. Once the heavy rain starts, wildfire risk starts dropping anyway.
The gel can be distributed using standard pumping equipment, so it should be quite easy to apply. And it wouldn't need to be sprayed everywhere: human-caused fires often start in high-risk places like roadsides. So, reducing wildfires wouldn't mean coating everything in retardant—focusing just on the high-risk zones would make a big difference.
Obviously, there's more testing needed before this option can be widely used, but this could be a beacon for a world facing ever more extreme wildfires.
Wildfire prevention through prophylactic treatment of high-risk landscapes using viscoelastic retardant fluids (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907855116)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 07 2019, @02:11PM (1 child)
The real story is its kinda a lame paper for a couple reasons:
1) Its really old idea massively commercialized to sell fire retardant gel to residential and commercial property owners in CA to protect their individual infrastructure. So this is kinda the academic equiv of a business methods patent that having the .gov spray roadsides to prevent fires starting is "innovative"
2) Basically a wealth transfer from people who live in sane locations to pay the costs of people who live in insane locations. Like endlessly rebuilding after regular periodic flooding, or government subsidies of urban city life.
3) My guess is much like dioxane seemed like a nice dust cutting oil for gravel roads until whoopsie doozie its not kosher anymore, this slimy stuff just has the feel that in a couple decades we're gonna regret that it turned desert lizards into godzilla or whatevs. I mean, stop living on a pile of kindling, nah thats too obvious, why not F with the ecosystem on an industrial scale to levels never tried before, like what could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday October 07 2019, @11:45PM
You are almost certainly thinking of dioxin [britannica.com], not dioxane [wikipedia.org]. The former is the toxin made notorious by the Times Beach crisis.
Also, the dioxin was incidental to the dust suppression; it just happened to be mixed with the oil that was the active ingredient. (Not that spreading used motor oil on the ground is a good idea, either...)
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