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This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've b

This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've been using since the 1960's when Phos-Chek was introduced. There have been significant improvements in information (locating fires early with satellites and drones as such), which is no doubt valuable, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actually putting out an aggressive fire. Perhaps someone who knows the state of the art can correct me. However, I feel like there are some startup opportunities here, either for endpoint structure defense or firefighting equipment. There is a real need that will likely continue to grow over time. Some things that came to mind: - Easily deployable, compressed CO2 canisters coordinated to smother fires from crossing strategic lines e.g. at a fire road on a ridge - More effective use of high powered drones for firefighting delivery - Use of special explosives or projectiles in remote / inaccessible terrain *yes, this comes with major caveats - Has materials science advanced to the point where we can launch reusable tarps on fires to smother them?

pluto_modadic 2y ago
this has to be parody. what?!
- lend000 2y ago
  I genuinely don't understand what happened to HN. When did curiosity, hypothetical discussion, and an interest in solving problems with technology become a source of derision and insecurity? Are you on the right forum?
  - quesera 2y ago
    There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical. There's a time for "just spitballing here", or "divergent thought, no bad ideas". And you can probably find some folks today who want to think about this tragedy in that frame of mind. But. There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical. I did not downvote you, but I suspect the others who did are conveying a distaste for such abstract thought about this extremely visceral ongoing disaster.
soared 2y ago
Those things might make sense if one building is on fire, but the scale of these fires and similarly sized forest fires make targeting individual building useless - there are hundreds or thousands of buildings on fire. Forest fire fighting is pretty contentious, but we now have very specialized planes and helicopters that I assume didn’t exist decades ago. Similarly there are 747s that drop 20k gallons of fire retardant that I assume is new tech. Not sure if trenches are new or not, but also pretty common for forest fires.
vachina 2y ago
You do not want and cannot have a startup run these critical services. Just reeks of VC opportunists and cash grab.
- lend000 2y ago
  Running critical services is a whole different thing than developing technology to sell to fire departments (which is already what happens, albeit with less innovation than I'd like to see).
lm28469 2y ago
We should stop believing tech can and will solve every single of our problems. Between climate change, poor forest maintenance, poor infrastructure maintenance, building in risk areas, &c. it's all a matter of time. We're not gods and we will never be, we should have learned to live with our environment, not against it.
baq 2y ago
Or perhaps build in a way that can survive a fire if you want to live in a bush fire prone area…? Maybe don’t plant eucalyptus on the yard, etc.
- lend000 2y ago
  Why not both? Plenty of well defended houses burned down this week -- don't underestimate just how fireproof your house needs to be to withstand something like this. And littering everything with fire retardants comes with a whole different set of health and environmental problems.
eesmith 2y ago
That's an awful lot of CO2. You need it to stay there a long time, until the temperature gets below the ignition point, otherwise once the O2 comes back it will relight. You'll need it to get above the vegetation. You'll somehow need to prevent mixing of CO2 and O2 - remember, fires produce CO2 already. CO2 is heavier than air. It will not stay on a ridge but will flow downslope. CO2 is an invisible suffocation risk, as over 1,000 people near Lake Nyos learned back in the 1980s. "High-powered drones" have nothing like the carrying capacity of large aircraft. If that was all that's needed then just buy the aircraft. You'll need a lot of water, which will need to come from somewhere. Water is heavy. Explosives have long been used for point fires, like oil and gas well fires, to deprive the fire of oxygen. You cannot blow up 100 acres of fire at once. The Santa Ana winds are powerful. The plume of smoke above the fires shows how much energy is in the rising heated air. Any covering must handle all that power, and not be torn up, and not be burnt up. For comparison, the biggest sailing ships had less 1.5 acres of sail, and the biggest wind turbines have a swept area of about 12 acres.
- lend000 2y ago
  CO2 is a major hazard, but of all the ideas listed and that I've read elsewhere, it does seem to have the most potential when the hazards are managed. That and tarps (instead of throwing them on the fire, perhaps laying them down to create strategic barriers to the spread of the fire). But it's undoubtedly a very hard engineering challenge. Some of the photos of the fire show the flames dwarfing the planes used to drop retardant.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    There is no potential with CO2. Have you worked out how much CO2 would be needed? How to prevent mixing with air? How it will be stored and deployed? How many people might die should there be a container breach? The first two seem mind-boggling. "Strategic barriers to the spread of the fire" are called firebreaks. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak points out: > ... it is still sometimes possible for fire to spread across a seemingly impenetrable divide. For example, during the Cedar Fire of 2003, strong Santa Ana winds had blown enough burning embers across a 10-lane section of Interstate 15 to ignite the vegetation on the other side.[3] During the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park, hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep. Have you any thought for how large these tarps will need to be? 10 lanes is 120 feet. Fire crews already make firebreaks by using machines to clear out vegetation. They'll need a machine to lay out this enormous tarp. And where there isn't a road (which is its own firebreak), it will be hard to get any machine.

pluto_modadic 2y ago

this has to be parody. what?!

lend000 2y ago
I genuinely don't understand what happened to HN. When did curiosity, hypothetical discussion, and an interest in solving problems with technology become a source of derision and insecurity? Are you on the right forum?
- quesera 2y ago
  There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical. There's a time for "just spitballing here", or "divergent thought, no bad ideas". And you can probably find some folks today who want to think about this tragedy in that frame of mind. But. There's a disaster going on today, this very hour, and your suggestions are absurdly impractical. I did not downvote you, but I suspect the others who did are conveying a distaste for such abstract thought about this extremely visceral ongoing disaster.

soared 2y ago

Those things might make sense if one building is on fire, but the scale of these fires and similarly sized forest fires make targeting individual building useless - there are hundreds or thousands of buildings on fire. Forest fire fighting is pretty contentious, but we now have very specialized planes and helicopters that I assume didn’t exist decades ago. Similarly there are 747s that drop 20k gallons of fire retardant that I assume is new tech. Not sure if trenches are new or not, but also pretty common for forest fires.

vachina 2y ago

You do not want and cannot have a startup run these critical services. Just reeks of VC opportunists and cash grab.

lend000 2y ago
Running critical services is a whole different thing than developing technology to sell to fire departments (which is already what happens, albeit with less innovation than I'd like to see).

lm28469 2y ago

We should stop believing tech can and will solve every single of our problems. Between climate change, poor forest maintenance, poor infrastructure maintenance, building in risk areas, &c. it's all a matter of time. We're not gods and we will never be, we should have learned to live with our environment, not against it.

baq 2y ago

Or perhaps build in a way that can survive a fire if you want to live in a bush fire prone area…? Maybe don’t plant eucalyptus on the yard, etc.

lend000 2y ago
Why not both? Plenty of well defended houses burned down this week -- don't underestimate just how fireproof your house needs to be to withstand something like this. And littering everything with fire retardants comes with a whole different set of health and environmental problems.

eesmith 2y ago

That's an awful lot of CO2. You need it to stay there a long time, until the temperature gets below the ignition point, otherwise once the O2 comes back it will relight. You'll need it to get above the vegetation. You'll somehow need to prevent mixing of CO2 and O2 - remember, fires produce CO2 already. CO2 is heavier than air. It will not stay on a ridge but will flow downslope. CO2 is an invisible suffocation risk, as over 1,000 people near Lake Nyos learned back in the 1980s. "High-powered drones" have nothing like the carrying capacity of large aircraft. If that was all that's needed then just buy the aircraft. You'll need a lot of water, which will need to come from somewhere. Water is heavy. Explosives have long been used for point fires, like oil and gas well fires, to deprive the fire of oxygen. You cannot blow up 100 acres of fire at once. The Santa Ana winds are powerful. The plume of smoke above the fires shows how much energy is in the rising heated air. Any covering must handle all that power, and not be torn up, and not be burnt up. For comparison, the biggest sailing ships had less 1.5 acres of sail, and the biggest wind turbines have a swept area of about 12 acres.

lend000 2y ago
CO2 is a major hazard, but of all the ideas listed and that I've read elsewhere, it does seem to have the most potential when the hazards are managed. That and tarps (instead of throwing them on the fire, perhaps laying them down to create strategic barriers to the spread of the fire). But it's undoubtedly a very hard engineering challenge. Some of the photos of the fire show the flames dwarfing the planes used to drop retardant.
- eesmith 2y ago
  There is no potential with CO2. Have you worked out how much CO2 would be needed? How to prevent mixing with air? How it will be stored and deployed? How many people might die should there be a container breach? The first two seem mind-boggling. "Strategic barriers to the spread of the fire" are called firebreaks. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak points out: > ... it is still sometimes possible for fire to spread across a seemingly impenetrable divide. For example, during the Cedar Fire of 2003, strong Santa Ana winds had blown enough burning embers across a 10-lane section of Interstate 15 to ignite the vegetation on the other side.[3] During the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park, hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep. Have you any thought for how large these tarps will need to be? 10 lanes is 120 feet. Fire crews already make firebreaks by using machines to clear out vegetation. They'll need a machine to lay out this enormous tarp. And where there isn't a road (which is its own firebreak), it will be hard to get any machine.