Stanford materials scientist Eric Appel usually develops gels that can be used to ferry drugs into the human body. A shot-full of his gel loaded with antibodies would persist in a patient for about a year – helping fight infection in the individual and face down an epidemic for the rest of the population.
Then, one day, Appel’s brother-in-law, former fire prevention forester Jesse Acosta, asked him if it would be possible to use the gel as a fire retardant to stop forest fires by applying it to Earth’s body – Mother Nature. The idea being that instead of filling the gel with antibodies, it could be filled with the stuff they drop onto forest fires from airplanes to slow them down.
The problem with the fire controlling material is that it only helps for a moment, but as soon as wind or rain comes, it washes away and leaves the land susceptible to fires again. So, Acosta thought that maybe with the gel, it could treat an area long-term to be resistant to fire, the same way it keeps the antibodies fighting off infection in the human body all year.
From that “eureka moment” came the creation of a preventative treatment for wildfires. It is a benign (non-toxic) gel-like fluid mixed with common wildland fire retardants that can be applied safely to vegetation as a long-lasting treatment against wildfires. The approach has been outlined in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Appel said:
The funny thing is that the engineering requirements for delivering a drug in a body for a very long period of time are pretty darn similar to the engineering requirements for maintaining a fire retardant on target vegetation for months. It needs to be safe; it needs to be totally non-toxic; it needs to not harm the function of the thing you’re encapsulating.
The idea is to apply the material to fire-prone areas to prevent fires throughout the entire peak fire season. Such a strategy could prove more effective and less costly than current firefighting methods to stop fires from even happening in the first place.
Appel said:
This has the potential to make wildland firefighting much more proactive, rather than reactive. What we do now is monitor wildfire-prone areas and wait with bated breath for fires to start, then rush to put them out.
Study lead author Anthony Yu, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering at Stanford, added:
You can put 20,000 gallons of this on an area for prevention, or 1 million gallons of the traditional formulation after a fire starts.
The treatment is mainly composed of cellulose polymers (a plant-derived substance) and colloidal silica particles (something similar to sand). The polymers construct bridges between the particles, which is what creates the gelatinous structure. Appel describes it as such:
What happens is the polymers cross-link between the particles—I often refer to it as sort of a molecular Velcro.
The team has founded a start-up to commercialize the material, and if adopted widely, it is applied around roads and utility infrastructure, for example. According to the researchers, those locations are where 84% of California’s 300,000 fires occurred in the last decade.
