If we handle megafires well, we'll have more trees and that means less megadrought. We also want to save lives and property.

For further reading: Recent Megafire Smoke Columns Have Reached the Stratosphere, Threatening Earth’s Ozone Shield. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17032022/megafire-stratosphere/

For further reading: Dangerous Air: As California Burns, America Breathes Toxic Smoke. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28092021/dangerous-air-california-united-states-toxic-smoke/

For further reading: Colorado’s Suburban Firestorm Shows the Threat of Climate-Driven Wildfires is Moving Into Unusual Seasons and Landscapes. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07012022/colorados-suburban-firestorm-shows-the-threat-of-climate-driven-wildfires-is-moving-into-unusual-seasons-and-landscapes/

T1. Off-season prescribed burns

Australian aboriginal tribes would burn small sections of their scrubland, not in fire season but in the offseason. A burned section of scrubland, prairie or forest creates a natural firebreak, possibly inhibiting a fire's spread during fire season. It also increases neighborhood biodiversity.

Lots of people protect their own individual homes from wildfire. A few communities take a strategy of protecting their neighborhoods with a collective fireline. No one, to my knowledge, actively prepares to limit megafires by setting up megafire lines with prescribed burns. Assume that your state is going to have to make a stand at this line some day, or else your citizens are going to pay all of the bills one way or another, so make allowance for greater fire line widths in tougher terrain.

Herds of strategically located goats have been used to clear green vegetation, creating firebreaks in the offseason.

Beaver dams turn narrow streams into wide wetlands. When a stream is widened into bogs by a string of beaver dams, often as not a fire can't leap the bogs. It's useful to start with a long series of artificial dams on a certain stream, creating a uniformly excellent firebreak line up and down the stream regardless of beaver activity. If colonies of beavers then augment the heights of these artificial dams as they choose, in a flash flood the dams might overtop at random spots along the artificial levees. However, the beaver colonies will then patch these holes. It's best to build levees that are resistant to sideways erosion and undercutting if they are breached.

If a fire service already suspects that the area 200 feet to either side of a certain highway is likely to be a fireline because of ease of access, that potential fireline needs to be pre-cleared of brush before fire season. In dry areas of the world, small springtime prescribed burns can take place as soon as the low-level springtime bracken begins to dry out. Underbrush at low elevations will dry out a few days or weeks before underbrush at high elevations dries out. Traveling professional fire crews might work the prescribed burns from south to north, just as harvesting corporations with combines will harvest wheat from north to south as the harvest season progresses.

T2. Energy-efficient airdrops

Currently a firefighting airplane must scoop water up from the surface of a large lake, and large lakes are rare in certain sections of the country. Helicopters carry Bambi buckets that they dip into nearby ponds and then dump on the fire.

It might be more energy-efficient and more cost-efficient to use airborne drones radio-controlled by operators thousands of miles away. Why risk a pilot's life in a smoky, windy environment? Why spend extra fuel to lift the weight of a 200 pound pilot? Why send the plane to regularly refuel hundreds of miles away?

Current electric planes work well for hops of, say, 50 miles. Why not have interchangeable battery packs on electric drone planes, the better to keep the drones constantly in the air?

The U.S. is loaded with straight highways that might double as airstrips close to the fire. It would be energy-efficient and also drone-efficient to set up an airstrip on a stretch of roadway. I envision forklifts moving individual drones off of a truck or from a landing area to a drone loading area and then to a taxi strip for takeoff. Forklifts unload plugins containing fully charged battery packs next to an airdrop payload from supply trucks. The forklifts attach these fresh units to the drones and load the spent units back onto the supply trucks.

T3. Ice airdrops on wildfires

Water is dropped from the air for two purposes. Sometimes water is dumped before the fire arrives so that living plants are heavy with water and are less likely to burn. At other times the water is dumped on the hottest part of the fire in order to knock the fire down somewhat.

In a recent extremely hot, low-humidity megafire, at times 100% of a load of water dumped onto a fire evaporated as it fell through the air before reaching the ground where it could cool the burning fuel. Nothing was accomplished with that load of water. Can we do better?

It costs roughly the same amount of electric battery power for a drone plane to drop perhaps 500 pounds of ice on a fire as it costs to drop 500 pounds of liquid water on the fire. Ice is colder than water. Compared to water, ice can deliver twice the firefighting coolness pound per pound. The argument against ice is that, at least for now, it's harder to deliver frozen to the site. That doesn't mean delivery costs might not drop in the future, and the real cost of delivery into a megafire is that dangerous last mile.

We don't want to drop a solid block of ice. We would do better to drop a load of ice that disperses something like a 1,000-gallon load of water on the way down. We want to ship a compact block of ice, but that same block of ice has to disperse into slow-falling little ice chips that won't hurt any people or plants when they land.

So, I recommend manufacturing ice blocks comprised of many parallel 1/16 inch thick sheets of ice separated by even thinner layers of guar gum, of clay dust or of some other separating material. As soon as each well-packed ice block drops from the drone's cargo bay and starts free-falling, the 1/16 inch ice sheets start sliding apart from each other. Air gets between the individual ice sheets and then the falling ice sheets separate into individual 1/16 inch thick ice panels.

In one version the falling ice sheets might fracture in the wind pressure into many relatively small, spinning, slow-falling ice chips. Individual ice chips flip around and fall at a slower rate of speed than large water droplets. Lightweight ice chips are coated with guar gum so that when they land on green leaves, they stick to the leaves.

As drawn here, the thin ice panels fall like inverted parachutes for accurate airdrops. They shatter into chips as soon as they hit the first tree branch or the ground.

Ice chips without guar gum will fall through flames to the base of the fire better than dispersed tiny water droplets will land on the ground at the base of the fire, refrigerating the ground as they melt. Their cold effectively inhibits the fuel on the ground from burning as each ice chip melts and again as the water evaporates. More of the melted water globules or unmelted ice pieces will reach the ground. In the end a gallon of ice should disrupt the fire better than a gallon of water.

The ice sheets are designed not to seriously injure people or hurt tree branches when they land at slow speeds. Rather, larger ice sheets will shatter upon any impact.

An ice sheet shaped like a parachute in reverse, with the center bowed downward, will tend to fall at a slow rate of speed and straight down.

Small cotton threads in the ice sheet or in an icicle might give it more internal stability until it shatters.

Seriously chilled ice, ice chilled to perhaps 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, might disrupt a wildfire even better than 32 degree ice, and the sliding materials between ice sheets will stay dry and stable at such extremely low temperatures. The Forest Service could build and stockpile thousands of ice block packages well beforehand, drive freezer tractor trailers full of these ice block units as close to a fireline as possible and then airdrop the ice using a parade of radio controlled drones traveling in a loop.

I imagine that each ice block gets its own insulating box and the box comes with a fully charged battery pack that powers the drone for one round trip.. Once the special box is locked into a drone plane's fuselage, the drone is able to mechanically pop open the bottom of the box on command, releasing all of the panes of ice at once. The ice box/battery unit must fit aerodynamically and securely into the drone's fuselage.

A standard firefighting drone will need stubby wings so that it can land on a fairly narrow road with only a short runway distance. Multiple sets of drone wings might help with the lifting.

T4. Launching wildfire icicles from trucks

I want some way to quickly lob ice at a brush fire from a road or from a vehicle on a trail. Our goal is to lob ice at a target at a minimum possible throwing speed. As before, the ice must hit its target with relatively little impact for safety reasons. The ice cube needs to stay intact when lobbed upwards, but it must fall apart and shatter easily when it lands inside the fire. Our choices are long icicles and ice frisbees.

An air gun capable of launching pre-made long ice bullets, icicles, at a fire might have a longer firing range than any water hose. An air-powered icicle-shooting artillery truck lobs 1/4” round by 36 ” long icicle-shaped bullets out of a gun pointed upward at about a 45 degree angle. If the icicles are accelerated smoothly they shouldn't break on launch. In the air icicle bullets will have a high ratio of mass to air friction for long distance firing from a road or from a trail. At firing the icicle is pointed end-first into the wind for minimum air friction. The gun barrel imparts a spin to each icicle, which keeps the icicle oriented upward. We might want an oval-shaped icicle gun barrel and form-fitting oval icicles so that we impart this spin. As gravity pulls each spinning icicle back toward the earth, the spinning icicle is still oriented 45 degrees upward but it's headed 45 degrees downward, and so the icicles always land on their targets sideways. Thin icicles safely shatter when hit from the side because thin icicles have limited lateral strength.

Supply trucks would bring fresh magazines of supercooled icicle bullets from a factory warehouse to the firelines. Used icicle cartons might possibly fold flat for return to the warehouse.

An accurate icicle cannon might be able to penetrate a series of icicles through a window or through a hole in a building's roof, so that the icicle cannon might have some value in quickly putting out rural or urban building fires at long range.

T5. Ground and air firefighting drones

Each radio-controlled drone firefighter is a human firefighter sitting in a climate-controlled office who most likely won't need a funeral tomorrow.

Firefighters regularly need to dig fire lines, often with some variety of tractor. Could an automated tractor handle 90% of such a dig? Firefighters want to hose down the land immediately behind the fire line. Can that job be handled by a drone? Behind any fire line, the fire command needs to detect and then smother any spot fires caused by embers blowing far over the fire line. Can the detection job be automated? Can hovering aerial drones be redirected to knock down newly detected spot fires?

Radio-driven ATVs can haul tools and water to the front lines. ATVs can run about and put out spot fires caused by blowing embers. Specialty vehicles can remove trees from fire lines . Humans might still be needed to handle various high-skill jobs or jobs in the rougher terrain.

T6. Firehose advances

Firehoses deliver water to a fire with far more energy-efficiency than airdrops. I recommend that firehoses be redesigned to pump water farther up hillsides.

A firehose could be constructed with its own flexible electrical cable built into the side of the firehose. Connecting two firehoses should automatically connect their wiring. An electric water pumping station can be added where any two firehoses connect. A series of alternating firehoses and electric pumps could effectively pump water from a nearby stream all the way up a rather tall ravine or hillside. High pressure electric pumps near the end would deliver a strong stream of water to a firefighter's nozzle. The system would still need electricity, but an electricity supply vehicle attached at any point to the firehose's electric cable could power the system.

Don't use 110 volts AC in a firehose because you'll electrocute a firefighter someday. 24 volt direct current is relatively safe. Keeping all firehose electrical connections dry and electrically insulated is an issue. Each firehose end should have a flange that swings out upon connection and keeps the electrical connection perhaps 4 inches off the ground to keep it dry.

It's possible to design all firehose segments with two equal ends. Each end of a firehose segment has one electric prong sticking out, the second prong is recessed and the ground wire is half and half. Each end of a firehose segment comes with a waterproof 24 volt electric outlet for various uses such as power tool and small vehicle recharging.

Firehose ends need flexible plastic or spring-loaded clips so that when seconds count they easily connect together with a single plug-in push and then they stay locked securely together until the locking clips are released.

For longer distance pumping efficiency over a flat trail, slightly wider than normal firehose diameters would be used to minimize water friction in a long distance hose system. Remember that friction is inversely related to velocity to perhaps the third power, and that doubling the width of a firehose quadruples the firehose's cross-section, which lowers the velocity of a stream of water inside that firehose by a factor of four.

For mountainous uphill pumps, firehoses should come with multiple electric pumps built into the middle of the firehose. A firehose with internal pumps won't need to have extra bursting strength.

For occasional mountainous downhill pumping a firehose should have valves that limit the water pressure as water flows downhill. Usually water is pumped upwards from a stream bed, but occasionally a highway near a ridgeline is the closest path navigable by motor vehicles.

Wide diameter water main firehoses would be capable of supplying water and electricity to multiple smaller firehoses at a wilderness location a distance from the nearest road. For further reading see: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/q-a-john-vaillant-wildfires-bc-nwt-1.6942576 They're now using 12 inch water mains to move water to sprinkler systems that douse entire communities.

An electrical line might power a robotic firehose nozzle. A wall can collapse in a fire, killing a firefighter, but a robotic firehose nozzle could safely move the nozzle closer to a fire or to a propane tank farm than could a live firefighter. If the nozzle can be moved closer, a telepresence robot could pour water onto a target with less firehose pressure than normal.

I recommend designing a system of electronically controlled water pumps and pressure valves that can keep a constant, measured pressure in a long system of hoses that goes up and down with the terrain. The lighter the maximum water pressure inside the water main, the lighter the hoses and the easier it is to run hoses a mile or two in tough conditions. Firefighters should be able to assume a constant water flow from the end of any hose.

In arid or in mountainous locations, sometimes the only water available will be a parade of water-carrying trucks that line up on a nearby highway. Each water truck must connect quickly to the pumper/storage truck, water must be transferred over at a good speed to the storage truck's oversized storage tank or tanks, which might be assembled on the ground next to the pumper/storage truck, and then each water truck disconnects and leaves for another load. Each battery truck carrying an electrical power supply for the entire fire operation also needs to drive up ,plug in, get drained of power, plug out and leave for another load of power. We never want zero battery trucks plugged in, so we need something to tide the system over between the time that one battery truck leaves and its replacement pull s in. Because parking space is at a premium on the side of a narrow highway, extra-narrow trucks and water storage tanks might be helpful.

The series of pumps should only turn on when the firefighter at the far end needs water. The nozzle at the end of each hose should have an on-off switch for the pumper and/or for the tee where a main hose splits.

Do we need special nighttime fire response capabilities? Would better lighting on the firehoses and on the nozzles help? All firehoses should be well-lit all night when deployed, so all firehoses need built-in lighting devices. What else needs power on the fire line? Battery recharging slots? In general, speed and efficiency in deployment are valuable.

T6a. Pulse water cannons

A water cannon at the end of a long hose that has a built-in electrical connection, with a low water pressure input, can build up a huge air pulse that propels the accumulated slow trickle of water input, to create a big flying slug of water that might hold its shape fairly well in the air. Set up this big air cannon to launch the water slugs. A remote firefighter can control the release velocity of the water slugs so that they land on key parts of the fire with the minimum energy input necessary to fire the cannon. It saves energy to have a drone drive the pulse water cannon somewhat dangerously close to the fire, without the human firefighter being near the pulse cannon. A computer program for systematically dousing an entire area, splash by splash, coordinating the spraying with adjacent pulse water cannons, is possible.

Any pulse water cannon will need a firm base for its recoil. It will need a long steel launch tube that can be aimed by azimuth and elevation remotely, and it needs a camera for its human controller. A stereoscopic infrared camera can automatically aim pulses of water at hot spots.

T7. City water vs water for fires

Western U.S. towns might benefit from having several types of water pipes. Firefighting water need not be as sterile or as chemically pure as a town's drinking water. Brackish water might work on a fire.

In an electrical world, city fire hydrants should be equipped with electrical wiring. Whenever a fire hose with wiring is attached to the hydrant, the water-pumping fire truck automatically gets plugged into the electric grid. Fire trucks shouldn't need to haul huge fuel reserves around the city.

States might want to pre-install fire hydrants, pipes and pumps near streams. In the event of a local fire, the pipe would move water from the stream to a pumper truck on the road above the stream. Deployment speed is important in the event of a fire.

T8. Trail, creek and steep mountain vehicles for firefighting

Some of our firefighting R&D engineers can focus on making firefighting vehicles that fit on ever-narrower trails or that can traverse ever-steeper hillsides. The mountain bike industry already worries about the trail riding desires of competitive mountain bikers.

We may want to quickly lay firehoses down narrow, winding forest trails. A redesigned motorbike or a notably skinny four wheeler might carry a 500 foot roll or two of large-diameter firehose behind its back wheel, plus electric water pumps might be stowed on the bike.

Given a fleet of motorbikes driving up a trail, each bike should be measuring exactly where the previous bike's hose is going to run out. If each bike can lay down 1000 feet of hose and 1 pump in the right spot, a fleet of perhaps five bikes can deliver a firehose full of water 5,000 feet off of the nearest road or 5,000 feet from the nearest usable stream in record time.

With the extreme weight that a workhorse motorcycle would carry, we might want to make the extra-heavy chopper a bit easier to handle in dense brush and atop tough rock formations. Extra low gears might help the cyclist go forward in tough uphill situations. A larger diameter front wheel and better shocks might reduce the physical pounding whenever the cyclist travels over a big rock or a log. A cross between a motorcycle and a 4-wheel ATV is possible, where the extra wide wheels help the cyclist keep the chopper upright without sacrificing the chopper's ability to get through rather narrow openings in the forest. A plexiglass brush cage will enable the motorcyclist to safely drive through brush loaded with thorns. Of course the cyclist carries a chain saw to cut through any large dead trees lying across the trail.

A Segway scooter can balance on one wheel. Perhaps the next generation of heavy duty brush motorcycles should be equipped with internal balance software so that they might carry half a metric ton of payload.

[drawing] Below is a thin water truck designed to travel on thin and tough trails. It has four axles and eight wheels that track around curves properly. It has driver cabs on both ends because at times there's no way to turn around on a trail. It needs to travel at highway speeds. It nearly goes up a cliff.

In an electrical world, we need a small fleet of battery trucks to bring power to the remote water pumps and to recharge drones on the ground. As soon as one truck runs low on juice the next truck gets connected.

T9. Trucking in water on roads

Do we have a fleet of water tankers that can drive close to the fire lines, and then a pumper can deliver the water the rest of the way? Do we need special trucks that can take heavy smoke and that can drive through more difficult fire conditions than a normal truck can handle? Do we need vehicles with tires that won't melt, or with reflective shielding over the sides of the tires? Do we need carrier flatbeds to haul these specialized vehicles to the fire? Do we need to haul in higher quality encampments for the firefighters on quick notice?

T10. Fireline ember and spark netting

If heliostat surfaces can be made with small holes to let wind through, why not have heat-reflecting fire netting with many small holes? The many holes can be tiny, similar to windowscreen holes, so that hurricane-force wind gusts can blow right through. However, most flying embers of a significant size won't make it through the screen. This means that the fire often stops at the fire netting. Most of the radiant heat from the approaching fire stops at the netting and gets reflected back and possibly upwards.

Sections of fire netting would most likely come with tall poles that snap into place in the field like tent poles. Different types of wildfires will require different heights of fire netting and poles. For now I'll pencil in a 5 meter tall net.

For each pole, a wide base with built-in spikes that can be staked down quickly into the topsoil would help. It would help if 90% of the spikes could be driven into the topsoil by simply stepping on them with a boot or if they are designed to self-drive on command. The poles might be springy so that extreme wind gusts will blow the poles half-sideways for a second but then the netting will soon spring back up.

Springy poles also mean that tall poles can be bent over when attaching sections of fire netting to grommets at the tops of the poles. If netting can be attached and then all the poles automatically spring up at the same time, that would simplify deployment. We want a kilometer of fire netting to go up in record time.

Magnets and velcro would help sections of netting to automatically close and lock against each other.

This same fire netting might protect the four walls of a house from blowing embers and from radiant heat.

I assume that each section of fire netting and each set of poles can be re-packed and re-used at another fire line 24 hours later.

T11. A smothering ground cover barrier for a fireline

A ground covering barrier analogue to fire netting is possible. This would replace the earthen trench that firefighters currently dig to create a fire line. We want a ground barrier that's faster to deploy and less expensive to pick up than digging an earthen trench.

We again need a reflective top that drives away the fire's radiant heat. The ground barrier needs to be air-proof, because quick combustion can't occur without fresh oxygen. Once the ground barrier is rolled into place a hose is attached and a bag of water at one end is quickly filled, possibly with a fire hose. Tubes of water near the front and back edges of the ground cover carry the water down the edges - on some slopes some type of air compression can drive the water uphill. The weight of the water presses down and makes it harder for any air to seep underneath the ground cover. Also, the water pulls heat away from the edges so that fire has trouble creeping underneath either edge of the ground barrier.

An entire ground cover barrier along with fire netting above the barrier could be inflated by pumping water into it with a fire hose.

T11a. Human neighborhood wildfire shelters

The Camp Fire of 2018 burned down the town of Paradise, California and caused 85 deaths because many people couldn't evacuate in the fast-moving fire's 50 mph winds. Can an elementary school be safely evacuated if the next wildfire is equally driven by 50 mph winds? Individual hotshot firefighters already carry portable fire shelter tents in case they get engulfed by fast-moving flames. What would it take to turn a neighborhood school or firehouse into a community wildfire shelter, and how many lives could such a refuge potentially save?

Concrete doesn't burn. The extreme heat coming from a bad fire may be an issue to solve. The community's wildfire shelter might need to be equipped with its own oxygen-creating equipment. Also, asthmatic people can't breathe heavy smoke, so buy HEPA filters and be sure to stop up the cracks under the doors with insulation.

T12. Fire prevention R&D

ire prevention is generally the government's job, and as such, no free market of innovative ideas exists or has ever existed in our lifetimes. We must, as the military has already done in pressure situations, develop our own culture of fast. mission-critical R&D. We must be able to pull the plug on any research dead-end, until any new show-stopping problem is understood and fixed. At the same time we need to be able to plunge full speed ahead on promising breakthroughs.

Can we get serious about firefighting and pay people just to be pre-trained for jobs, just in case we have a particularly bad fire season?

It makes sense to get real about vast, rapid responses to wildfires. Why wait until the fire requires thousands of workers, destroys entire towns and costs billions of dollars? Why not simply be ready to hit a small fire with an entire army and put it out completely before it becomes huge? It seems like a dollar well-spent beforehand on fire prevention or on stronger early-stage response is better than $100 spent during the middle of the fire. That may be equally true of all sorts of fire R&D money.

In California the eucalyptus tree is an invasive species. It's also quite flammable and a fire hazard if it grows near any house. At the very least, native species could be planted next to all existing eucalyptus trees that eventually crowd out the eucalyptus trees.

T13. Fighting tundra megafires

We need to go after zombie fires that can burn through the cold Siberian and Alaskan winters under the ground and re-emerge.

Could we inject nitrogen gas deep into the ground in order to starve underground fires of oxygen?

Could we establish a flow of water through the fire area to pull the fire's high heat out of the ground at hot spots? If we built rice paddy-like marshes over the entire underground fire, would this deny additional oxygen to the fire below while draining heat out of the ground as water seeps downward? Would such a procedure equally help to put out the underground coal fire now burning at Centralia, Pennsylvania?

Can artificial snow-making machines lay down lines of snow to stop tundra and boreal forest fires from spreading? Will preventative fire lines built of large ice blocks also work? Many Arctic environments have frozen lakes from which ice blocks can be cut in winter.

For further reading: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/01/12/news/wildfires-are-digging-carbon-sinkholes-arctic

T14. Concentrated solar used as a military demining sweep

Some fields in France still contain active shells and poison gas canister shells from 1914-1918. After lying fallow for over 100 years the fields are now covered by mature forest. I see an argument for leaving the carbon in the mature forest, except climate changed forests are going to burn down like crazy someday, but I also see an argument for demining the fields and returning them to agriculture. In any case the rest of the world is full of much newer mined fields that need to be safely and inexpensively demined.

For explosives alone, it's possible to erect a huge and tall concentrating solar array at the corner of a field. On any moist or cool but sunny day when a wildfire won't burn, the solar array would focus perhaps 100 suns worth of solar heat on one small section of a field for minutes or for hours. It would heat and scorch individual patches of the field to a temperature that would cause any explosives buried deep in the field to ignite or fail. It would also melt and fuse any metal trip wires and ignition switches sticking out of the ground. Finally, buried primitive wooden booby traps would be neutralized by the same raw solar heat, and any disease vectors smeared on the wooden booby traps would become sterilized.

As a rule, it's better to solar burn pieces of the field downwind from the unburned part of the field. The strip of previously burned land acts as a firebreak on one side. If a solar array is situated on the northeast corner of a field and the wind is blowing from the west, concentrate on spots on the east side of the field. If the wind is blowing from the north, focus on spots on the south side of the field. Long-range icicle shooters can put out any spot fires with flying, crumbly icicles from a safe distance away.

After solar demining with 99% to 99.9% success it might be necessary to use a demining robot to find the last landmine. Still, solar demining performs a cost-efficient job, hopefully getting rid of complex, unusual systems of mines and booby-traps that the robot deminer alone wouldn't have been able to handle.