Unique Fire Suppression Feat
By S. Kriyu
The successful suppression of a wild land fire - without use of water or chemicals - will accelerate the race to find new uses for modern military technology.
White's concept Fire Attack Vehicle is a totally new idea. Using space-age thermal barriers, the completely fire-proofed FAV works along an active fire line, slashing and sweeping burning brush to the burned side of the line. High pressure air assists in the highly dynamic process to blow away heat and small combustible material. Thus deprived of heat, fuel and oxygen, the fire is extinguished in a continuous process. The ground and underlying plant root structures are left unscathed. Burning branches are brushed off of trees without damage to the tree trunk.
The significance of White's feat should not be underestimated. Working alone for most of the first three (3) years in a circa 1950 welding shop, White wrote the first patent application for the Fire Attack Vehicle; he created the original patent drawings; he created at least three (3) miniature prototype devices and tested them successfully in increasingly robust fire conditions; he created a full set of machine shop drawings for use in fabricating the first full-sized prototype, which he built mostly by himself with some help from his son Mat, retired welder Glenn Gobble and physicist Chas Eminhizer. White then rented land, obtained permits, and successfully tested the device on (deliberately set) wild fires in Imperial County, California, in January, 1996.
Ten (10) years ago, White shelved the idea of a direct attack fire suppression device when he concluded that terrain imaging problems in the smoke clouded fire line environment and would make operating the machine impractical. Then, in 1994, prompted by the deaths at Glenwood Springs, White reconsidered the fire attack vehicle.
He realized immediately, he recalls, that newly available infrared cameras and GPS had solved his imaging and vertigo problems. The first tests were conducted in his back yard, using a shop compressor and a blade powered by a hand-held drill motor, to test cutters and the effects of high pressure air on test beds of pre-positioned dry weeds and grass. Once he had built his first full-sized prototype, White soon discovered that finding a test site for the fire suppression device would be a major hurdle.
White recalls, "I must have called a hundred public agencies. Military reservations; Indian reservations; the counties and the state and federal forestry people. For our first in-fire tests, I had to rent property down in the desert, clear on the other side of the Salton Sea."
A second round of wildfire suppression testing was accomplished at Pala Indian Reservation, in Riverside County. "They were great," White says. "They managed four (4) separate test burns for us, all at no charge. We were there for three (3) months. We left our tools out overnight. We left the keys in the truck. Nobody ever touched anything. It was an altogether wonderful experience to work in such a community."