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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: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday October 07 2019, @03:24PM (1 child)
Heh. And of course those feel-good ingredients only apply to the gel - not to the fire retardent the gel is holding in place. The real question is, is the fire retardant itself, that would otherwise rapidly end up in the ground rather than on leaves, safe for wildlife to eat in large quantities.
Given the general toxicity of fire retardants, I somehow doubt that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @07:07PM
Yeah, these motherfuckers are full of shit. Chemical companies will poison anything to make a buck and the whore ass politicians make sure they get a way with it. At some point people will start getting shot for this shit and they'll deserve it. Why don't you whore politicians hold the power companies responsible for setting all the forest fires the media whores keep blaming on camp fires (yeah, fucking right).