[Science] Sticky fluid can be sprayed on grassy verges to prevent wildfires – AI

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[Science] Sticky fluid can be sprayed on grassy verges to prevent wildfires – AI


By Sam Wong Could there be an easier way to deal with wildfires?Erik Simonsen/Getty Images A weather-resistant fluid containing fire retardants can be sprayed onto vegetation to stop wildfires from igniting. Fire retardants are often used to protect buildings from an approaching fire, but these formulations aren’t effective once the water in them evaporates. Eric Appel at Stanford University in California and his colleagues have developed a gel-like fluid that sticks to vegetation and withstands weathering, potentially keeping the fire retardant in place for months. The idea is to spray it on vegetation in high-risk areas at the start of the fire season to prevent blazes from starting. Advertisement “Most people think fires happen willy-nilly anywhere in the forest. It turns out that’s not really true,” he says. His team worked with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) to analyse data from 305,000 fires in California in the past 10 years. It turned out that 84 per cent of fires had started at locations deemed high risk, such as roadsides or around utilities infrastructure. “What that analysis allowed us to see was, if you had the tools available, you could pretreat a small amount of land and prevent an enormous proportion of fires from occurring,” says Appel. “The issue is lack of available technology.” The new formulation was tested on plots of grass and chamise, a Californian shrub, which are types of vegetation where wildfires commonly ignite in the region. The tests showed that applying about 1 litre of fluid per square metre of land is enough to completely prevent ignitions. Read more: The pyrocene has begun: How to tackle a world of raging wildfires The fluid is made from non-toxic chemicals commonly used in food products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. At the end of the fire season, heavy rain should wash away the fluid and it should then biodegrade in the soil. Tests showed that it was benign to bacteria and would degrade anaerobically, so it won’t deplete oxygen in the soil. Appel has started a company to commercialise the product, and is working with Cal Fire to start treating a few roadside areas this week. “The only limitation to rolling it out on big scales is getting the government agencies involved to work together collaboratively,” he says. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907855116 More on these topics: chemistry fire forest fires

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