California Engineers Develop Wildfire-Preventing Gel Technology
Stanford University engineers worked with California state and local agencies to develop a long-lasting, fire-retarding material that is environmentally friendly. The researchers say that if the material is used on high-risk areas, it could dramatically reduce the number of wildfires that occur each year. The most widely used commercial fire-retardant formulations currently contain ammonium phosphate and its derivatives as the active fire-retarding component. These formulations only hold retardants on vegetation for short periods of time, so they can’t be used preventively. The Stanford technology is a cellulose-based, gel-like fluid that stays on target vegetation through rain, wind, and other environmental exposure.
Transcript
00:00:07 Wildfires in the United States burn roughly 10 million acres a year, and cost over two billion dollars annually just to fight. That's not even considering the implications for lives lost and property lost. Moreover, there's enormous health concerns. California's campfire this past November was the most deadly and destructive in the state's history. There were 86 fatalities and 19,000 structures were burned, including 14,000 homes. The only way to fight wildfires currently is reactively. We wait for them to start and then we go out and we use fire retardants in order to try to put them out. The majority of the research in my lab is focused on developing injectable hydrogels as carriers for
00:00:50 pharmaceuticals. My brother in law used to be the fire prevention forester for the state of Hawaii. He asked me - would it be possible to put fire retardants into these gels and use them to preventatively treat high-risk areas. And immediately the lightbulb went on. We have developed an environmentally benign hydrogel that can be used to prevent fire from starting. We've now done a number of field tests in wildfire-prone vegetation types, including grass and greasewood, which is also called chamise. We found that these treatments can persist throughout the entirety of the season including through weathering events and completely prevent fires from starting. This technology and the approach to prophylactically treating high-risk areas has the potential to
00:01:33 stop a number of fires from starting in the first place, saving the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in fire-prone areas worldwide.