New fire-fighting technology could help put them out. Why isn’t it being used?
Guest post by Paul Driessen
Millions of Americans watched their evening news in horrified fascination.
The Colorado Springs wildfire had doubled in size overnight, to 24 square miles – half the size of San Francisco – as 50-mph gusts carried fiery branches from exploding treetops across fire breaks, down Waldo Canyon and into fresh stands of drought-dried timber. Flames crested the ridge above the beautiful Air Force Academy campus, 346 houses burned, hundreds more faced immolation, and 32,000 people were evacuated, through smoke and ash that turned daytime into a choking night sky.
130 miles north, another monster fire west of Fort Collins consumed 136 square miles of forest and torched 259 homes. By July 4, this year’s Colorado forest fires had devoured 170,000 acres – 265 square miles, nearly five times the size of Washington, DC. Across eleven western states, nearly 2,000,000 acres have already burned this year; imagine all of Delaware and Rhode Island ablaze.
People died. Many homes are now nothing but ashes, chimneys and memories. In the forests, the infernos exterminated wildlife habitats, roasted eagle and spotted owl fledglings alive in their nests, boiled away trout and trout streams, left surviving birds and mammals to starve for lack of food, and incinerated every living organism in the thin soils, presaging massive erosion that will clog streambeds during downpours and snowmelts. Many areas will not recover their foliage or biodiversity for decades.
Having hiked in many of these areas, I’ve been truly depressed by these infernos. Why were they allowed to happen? “We are doing everything possible to control these blazes,” officials insist. One has to wonder.
Put aside the insanity of letting horse-blindered environmentalists, bureaucrats and judges obstruct even selective cutting to thin dense stands of timber or remove trees killed by beetles, after decades of Smoky the Bear management. Forget for a moment that these policies turn forests into closely bunched matchsticks, waiting for lightning bolts, sparks, untended campfires or arsonists to start conflagrations.
Ignore the guideline that say fires in these areas can be extinguished if they are of human origin (if making that distinction is even possible in the midst of an inferno) – but must be allowed to burn if they are “natural” (caused by lightning, for example), even amid droughts, in the hope that they won’t become raging infernos that threaten homes. Disregard the crazy jurisdictional disputes that prevent aircraft from dropping water on a fire, because the crew cannot tell whether the blaze is on Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service land.
Pay no mind to the fact that these fires emit prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide – along with large quantities of mercury, particulates and other pollutants. (Many rock formations contain mercury; trees absorb it through their roots, and release it into the atmosphere when they burn.)
Once a fire erupts, there is no reason it should devastate homes, suburban developments or vast forest areas. The technology exists to stop these fires, long before they reach such intensities and proportions.
Two days before Waldo Canyon burst into flames, a revolutionary fire suppressant stopped a 300-acre fire north of Albuquerque, New Mexico almost in its tracks. Just nine single-engine planeloads of FireIce (about 7,200 gallons) were needed to douse the flames, prevent nearby trees and homes from igniting, and insure that the fire remained permanently extinguished.
Dutch Snyder, the independent 27-year veteran fire-fighting pilot whose airplane handled this successful mission, remarked afterward that he had “never seen a retardant hold a fire line” so well, or “any product knock down a fire so quickly.”
According to its inventor, GelTech Solutions chief technology officer Peter Cordani, FireIce smothers fires, by taking heat and oxygen away from combustible materials. It can be dropped directly onto a fire, penetrating through to burning trees and brush – rather than just being dropped far from flames, in often futile efforts to create fire breaks that hold.
As many news outlets, like Fox 21 KXRM-TV in Colorado Springs, have documented in recent years (visit the GelTech website for video clips), this product can be dropped by plane to suppress wildfire intensity, or sprayed by homeowners on houses and landscaping to protect them from heat and flames. Even a 2,000-degree F blowtorch cannot ignite a wood board (or burn a human hand) coated in FireIce.
The product is non-toxic, non-corrosive and environment-friendly, Cordani says in the news stories. It’s been tested, certified and approved by the US Forest Service, which has FireIce and GelTech on its “qualified products list” of fire-battling chemicals and professionals. The company maintains its own state-of-the-art mixing equipment and is ready at a moment’s notice to assist aerial and ground fire-fighting operations anywhere in the USA. It can fill trucks and airplanes of any size, including 3,000-gallon Air Force C-130s and even 10,000-gallon DC-10 supertankers.
Duly impressed, I called the company to ask what role it was playing in fighting the Colorado blazes and why its technology apparently was not working. The answer shocked me. It had not been asked to help!
Despite all the news stories about FireIce, its certification by the USFS, and frequent communications between GelTech and federal, state and local officials – no one had contacted the company.
How is that possible? What will it take to persuade officials to break from traditional (and obviously inadequate) wildfire tactics and retardants, and use FireIce to combat what Colorado Springs Fire Chief Rich Brown called fires of “epic proportions” – to protect homes, habitats, wildlife and human lives?
New Mexico has now used FireIce with great success against several forest fires. With a long fire season still ahead, perhaps US Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Dan Jiron, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs Mayors Karen Weithunat and Steve Bach will now follow the example set by Governor Susana Martinez and her colleagues in the Land of Enchantment.
If they do not, responsible legislators and environmentalists should find out why – so that tragedies like these Colorado fires never happen again.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a ten-year Colorado resident, legislative aide for former US Senator Bill Armstrong of Colorado, former policy analyst for the US Department of the Interior, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
Related articles
- The Great Fire Of 1910 Places The Current 2012 Fire Season In Perspective (pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com)
- Western U.S. Will Keep Burning Unless Fire Policy Changes – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
- In Colorado wildfires, ‘worst in state history’, why won’t the Forest Service use the biggest firefighting tool available? (wattsupwiththat.com)
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In response to the remarks about the southern pine plantations…..
It is because the ground level fuel is burned off every 5 to 15 years. Even the Texas Forest Service does this in their own forest management. International Paper, Georgia Pacific, and others who manage some pine plantations near my home were burning understory fuel within a few miles of my home last summer when conditions permitted. Our drought was so intense, they recognized that as long as humidity coming up from the Gulf was high enough and winds were right, they could really get a good burn in the pine understory.
BTW, those understories are absolutely gorgeous this year due to the nutrient release, and nourishing rains we’ve had this year. There also are plants coming up that we don’t normally see unless an understory is burned.
I stand by my assertion that the best forest fire management system….. is fire.
LazyTeenager says:
July 24, 2012 at 6:52 am
Do you want government to do stuff but you don’t want to pay for it with taxes.
So somehow if fire fighting is done by private companies it’s all going to be cheaper. I can’t imagine how that’s going to work.
____________________________
If it is government land they are then responsible. on private land depending on the state, county or city you get told what to do. A friend has been told by Orange County NC that he may not cut down even one try on his ~ 60 ac. (I was doing some of the clearing at the time)
This is an example of what it mean.
The firefighting protocols are just the tip of the iceberg in this issue.
that is cutting a tree not try (Fumble fingers strike again)
I’m a Colorado native and have had a house in the forested front range for 30+ years and have followed wild land fire suppression fairly closely for some time. New chemicals would certainly help and every little bit helps but the critical deficiency in the process is the lack of air tankers to deliver the fire suppression chemicals. The history of air tankers is long and convoluted and not fun to read. The US Forest Service had 43 large air tankers under contract in 2000. Today they have 9 large air tankers under contract. Given the present budget and support, it is possible that 8 of the older P-2V tankers may retire faster than they can be replaced. That’s 9 large air tankers to cover the firefighting needs of the entire United States.
The military C-130’s that can be converted to firefighting capability with the 7 remaining MAFF system’s are not on standby [Air Guard assets require activation and unless Federally activated, they only serve their individual State’s requirements]. USAF Reserve aircraft are prohibited from responding until all available contract assets are being utilized. [US Economic Act of 1932]. The MAFF conversion system is not longer manufactured and the company that manufacture / maintained them recently lost its contract and closed.
US Forest Service budget for FY 2012: source US Forest Service web site
Suppression -46% [$ 485M] air tanker budget is included under suppression
State Fire Assistance – 36% [$ 25.6M]
Volunteer Fire Assistance -29% [$ 2.6M]
proposed US Forest Service budget for FY 2013:
Suppression + $78M [includes $20M to contract for additional large air tankers mentioned above]
State Fire Assistance -15% [$ 13.3M]
Volunteer Fire assistance – 10% [$ 1.3M]
There are additional details associated with the air tanker program and fire suppression but they do not promote any optimism that the program will serve national fire fighting needs. The Suppression budget shortfall would mitigate against but not excuse switching to Fire Ice to replace Phos-Chek if it is significantly more effective even if it is more expensive. However, given the penchant for cost-effectiveness studies in the government, someone has probably determined that it is not “cost effective” by whatever measures of effectiveness they decided to employ.
I believe the real problem is a critically underfunded fire suppression program, a paucity of fire suppression assets that isn’t going to get well for some time, and the unintended consequences of old public laws . Better chemicals won’t help if you can’t drop them on the suppression line.
If FireIce is that good at stopping a fire then even if it’s much more expensive than traditional fire retardants it ought to be cheaper overall to use to fight fires because fires would be limited in size and put out in less time thus costing less overall to fight.
The cynic in me thinks that there is a fire fighting industry that has a vested interest in having a certain minimum amount of fire acreage to fight each year to maintain their budgets and fire fighting jobs. Further I think all these prescribed burns we have around here are just “make work” projects to keep idle firefighters busy when there are no real fires to fight. The acreage burned in prescribed burns is so small compared to what potentially could burn that it’s hard to imagine that it provides the protection they claim it does.
I say let private industry come in and appropriately thin the forests, remove dead and down trees to produce whatever products they can.
I am a former Airtanker Pilot been in the business for ten years, may go back shortly.
I have been around various forms fo fire retardant, Liquid concentrate, GTS (gum thickened retardant.) used much in California, and various Fugitive or fading,type retardants. Fire Ice
has potential but as stated above it is very expensive for now.
also the lack of useful initial attack airtankers is a huge problem from 53 in 2002 to
nine or ten now. The super tankers VLAT’s like the DC10 and 747 are very useful for
containing a fire.but not for an initial strike. BTW I love the way CALFIRE does it. always
have, send’em out then think about it.. Resources at the fire then turn around the ones you don’t need expensive, yes but if it prevents a fire form going over the hill it saves money and lives..
@lazyteeenager
The contactors for fire services Airtankers Helicopters, Air attack, Smokejumper aircraft,
all have provided services cheaper and more effective than the Government for near 70
years. It does work.
Question- have you ever loaded retardant or swung a Pulaski? Jumped out of an
airplane into a fire? Rode a pumper into maelstrom of Chaparral and mesquite?
Faux Science Slayer says:
July 24, 2012 at 7:30 am
I responded as a volunteer….
_______________________________
Sounds familiar. I provided a semi trailer to collect goods for Katrina. FEMA did the same thing that time too. FEMA is all about protecting FEMA’s political turf and has nothing to do with actually helping people. If we wiped out FEMA completely the US citizens would all be better off.
Rod Everson says:
July 24, 2012 at 7:43 am
…. But I guess there aren’t any pests in the Southeast? Or maybe they just have better management?
___________________________
We have pests but the trees are generally better managed. Young forests are thinned and the material chipped and burned to generate electricity. Long leaf pine forests are harvested for the pine needle mulch. The tree stands are treated as a money generating crop just as an apple orchard is.
BTW- here is a video that is a great over view of what airtanker flying was and is
I have flown most of the Four engine Douglases in the video 60,62,66 of Butler Aircraft.
when I co-piloted for them
Know about 90% of the people that are in the video, too some still out there challenging
the old devil -fire -some retired, some dead.
Meanwhile, the largest firefighting tanker in the world, and based in the US, is not fighting fires here in the US. http://www.evergreenaviation.com/pdf/Supertanker_Statement_062912.pdf All because the Forest Service limits tanker size to 5,000 gallons and the 747 holds 20,000 gallons.
rogerknights says:
July 24, 2012 at 7:57 am
Faux Science Slayer says:
July 24, 2012 at 7:30 am
You story could make a good political ad…Maybe the Tea Party could do something, albeit with amateur production values.
___________________________
Sometimes amateur is actually much better because it is trusted more. Willi Münzenberg pioneered most of the manipulative political techniques. Ad hoc committees for endless causes, politicized arts festivals, mock trials, celebrity letterheads, disinformation stunts and protest marches all sprang from Münzenberg’s sheer genius for propaganda….Most of this army of workers in what Münzenberg called ‘Innocents’ Clubs’ had no idea they were working for Stalin.
Do any of those sound familiar?
Give me a Bucket of that Fire Ice, a pressure cleaner and point me towards the flames.
When FEMA or a lazy teenager(same thing) shows up,slap a chainsaw in one hand,a shovel in the other,and 40lbs of water on their back,and make it known where the fire is.They’ll slither off soon enough.
And as somebody said above,it is all political.But then maybe Solyndra and the gubermint have some secret guy standing by to make it happen for you?(oh wait)
I have 2 words for those that choose to live in wilderness: Defensive space.
Note: I am a conservative opposed to bureaucratic meddling in natural forces (fire is natural to the West) and opposed to wasting resources in fighting these fires, particularly to defend the hypocritical dorks that build in wilderness and ignore DS logic.
Wait – if they put the fires out how would they get the propaganda value from them? Surely that is worth more than people’s homes and lives.
Put aside… Forget for the moment… Ignore… Disregard… Pay no mind… FireIce to the rescue.
No, Mr. Driessen, we should NOT ignore the long list of failures. We should examine the whole of them, as a body of failures. FireIce will not cure all that ails with our miserably inept Federal land and fire management. It is not a panacea nor even a small fix for gross, systemic incompetence. Perhaps you missed the BAN on aerial fire retardant of any kind forced upon the Feds by Judge Molloy.
What “millions of Americans” are watching is catastrophic failure by DESIGN. There is a war on the West being waged from Washington D.C. As with any war, it involves destruction and takeover, extreme suffering, power-mad generals, an army of belligerents, a disconnected Congress, and a designed plan to lay waste to the land.
Let’s approach this issue with open eyes, not with selective vision.
Leave the source of the fire alone – it’s well documented that nature expects and copes with these events perfectly adequately and recovers all by itself.
The house owners INSURANCE companies should cover the cost of preventing the homes from burning using this fire-axe stuff (or the homeowners themselves can pay if they don’t have cover) – who has the most to lose here? (financially, not materialistically/memorabilia).
Selective tree harvesting would reduce the fire hazard, add a little income for the U.S. Treasury, reduce the creation of more carbon dioxide from forest fires, and lock up the carbon with the lumber produced. Any guess why this common sense option isn’t being pursued? Enviroreligion dogma?
This goop will only exacerbate the problem. The problem being: Too. Much. Fuel.
Nature has an interesting solution for too much fuel.
Why should they put the fires out? This is what is supposed to happen.
A friend’s son owns a rural property where his neighbour lit a fire that threatened him. He called in the local fire brigade. He was driving his bulldozer to form a fire break and instructed the brigade to back burn as he would be unable to return up a very steep slope.
The fire reached the break and jumped it and his property was burned out. He asked why they had not done the backburning and was told ‘ We fight fires we don’t light them!!’ The air was so blue they disconnected him from the two-way.
How on earth do you ‘fight’ a fire by allowing it to burn up to your feet and then expect to be able to put it out?
Gail Combs, just out of curiosity, have you spent any time browsing around that site you linked to? Or was it just a clearly readable version of what you were attempting to show, returned from a search?
That site definitely has some… um… “interesting” reading…
If counties were allowed to take control of federal forests, they would make sure this resource stays renewable, so overcutting would be squashed (they want jobs next year). They would also make sure fuel loads were kept to a minimum (they want jobs next year). They also would want employment to rise so they would make sure the resource was actually used (they want jobs next year). As it is, federal guv’mnt employees have their jobs in the bag complete with hottub conferences year after year so there is no incentive to actually work for their pay.
I tell you what, if I was running for pres and won, I would gut guv’mnt of all the intrusion into state and personal responsibilities, and stay out of people’s bedrooms, boardrooms, and baby wombs (take that “I can see Russia from my house”).
For example, I would make sure our dollar and exports, and our interstate roads and railways were topnotch. I would make sure our interstate mail got delivered and our military was ever ready to squash like a bug whoever hurts our folks, wherever they travel.
I would leave it up to states to police their own criminals, pollution, prostitution, drug laws, polluting-potential businesses, education systems, medical care, gun laws, catastrophies, and immigrant policies.
And because I am a multiple-card carrying concealed weapons’ permit red-blooded American, I would arrive at the oval office with a concealed weapon tucked between my Irish you-know-whats, ready to face the day’s phone messages. I would also hope that my White House chef knows how to cut up trout, steelhead, salmon, deer and elk, and prepare it just the way I like it. Sorry, I don’t think I will ever be able to get close enough to shoot a bear because for some odd reason, I am scared to death of them. But I do like bear meat very much.
However, don’t be lulled by my state’s rights stance, or my fear of bears. I totally believe in a Republic form of government where individual rights are to be upheld even if the majority don’t like ’em much. So beware if you wish to deny constitutional rights to an adult’s individual pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even if you don’t like who they have chosen to bunk with. Besides, it’s none of your #$%^ business.
So how come we have such a weak-kneed presidential string of candidates????? I’m just a nobody but seem to have greater convictions than our current slate of candidates. They are either cowered by far-right religion, or cowered by far-left watermelons. Doesn’t anyboy ever run based on their individual convictions of freedom anymore? As far as I can tell, our current selection seems immune to the splinters they are getting in their arses from wriggling this way and that on the fence rail.
anybody…I meant anybody
FireIce is just another chemical additive that comes along every two or three years as far as I can remember back if 35 years in the fire service industry. The first I remember was Fire Out around 197?. If FireIce was worth it’s salt it would have UL approvals for Class A, FM Approvals, etc. It can petition the government for approval of its product but, until it has passed muster they are not going to spend time and money to deliver an unproven product to protect lives and property only to get sued later.
Instead of bellyaching to the press they should be going through the necessary channels to prove the product is effective.
Phoschek has been around for years and has predictable results. If your house is exposed do want them to try something new or use proven technology. If the technology failed, would the company be able to absorb the losses or would the homeowners be left with the bare minimum of compensation for the experiment done on their property?
If it really is as effective as they claim it will get adopted for use, eventually. First it has to live up to its claims in heavy testing and then, it will have to be tested to see if it harms the easily offended environmental organizations. Good luck with that.
Just to repeat, every few years another “miracle cure” comes around the corner. Usually they have a real slick way of marketing to the small town departments and sell their product. Most reputable fire equipment dealers won’t sell their stuff due to lack of approvals so they have to resort to that method. If FireIce is actually a good product it will make it through the process. If not, next year a new product will follow it. In fact, there are a couple of companies taking a stab it it right now.
Rinse, repeat.