Firebomb
ANother tidbit found while doing "Nikolai" I wanted to know more about wildland fire fighting. The tales are legion. But this is a grand description of what it is like to stand in the path of a plane dropping fire retardant
"the method of delivery, as it gives the chemicals enough weight to bring the retardant to earth in a relatively cohesive pattern instead of dispersing throughout the atmosphere; a local, fire-retardant rainshower, if you will. Retardant is not used to put the fire out, but to slow its advance so the firefighters on the ground can contain the fire as quickly as possible, or have a better chance of escaping a blow-up. So, when a tanker goes to make a drop there is usually a hand crew or two (or twelve) very close to the drop zone; in fact, hand crews are routinely hit by retardant drops. Sometimes it's like you're in a mist of blood, sometimes a rainstorm, and sometimes it's like someone dropped a lake on you; 8.33 pounds per gallon X 20,000+ gallons X 32 feet per second per second = THUD! In order for a bomb to be able to deliver a enought of a retardant payload to make a difference, it would have to be the size of an airplane; you might as well put wings on it and pilots in it. For liquid nitrogen, the winds generated by a fire would be more than sufficient to keep the nitrogen from providing any kind of smothering action, and given its volitility, I don't know if enough would penetrate to the seat of the fire to have a significant cooling effect. There's also the fact that liquid nitrogen is a hazardous substance that burns just as surely as fire and requires specialized storage, transportation, handling, and training. It would be a logistical and financial nightmare, as well as a constant safety hazard for the crews. Fires also create their own weather: updrafts, downdrafts, thunderstorm cells, funnel clouds, you name it. The bigger the fire, the bigger the weather system it creates. This already plays havoc with the winged aircraft (helicopters, tankers) and would certainly be ruinous to a blimp. The biggest problem I see with the fixed-wings (airplanes) used by the forest service is their age: most, if not all, are vintage WWII military surplus warhorses that had already been severely abused by at least one war when the forest service bought them some fourty or 50 years ago. IOW, we need new aircraft."
"the method of delivery, as it gives the chemicals enough weight to bring the retardant to earth in a relatively cohesive pattern instead of dispersing throughout the atmosphere; a local, fire-retardant rainshower, if you will. Retardant is not used to put the fire out, but to slow its advance so the firefighters on the ground can contain the fire as quickly as possible, or have a better chance of escaping a blow-up. So, when a tanker goes to make a drop there is usually a hand crew or two (or twelve) very close to the drop zone; in fact, hand crews are routinely hit by retardant drops. Sometimes it's like you're in a mist of blood, sometimes a rainstorm, and sometimes it's like someone dropped a lake on you; 8.33 pounds per gallon X 20,000+ gallons X 32 feet per second per second = THUD! In order for a bomb to be able to deliver a enought of a retardant payload to make a difference, it would have to be the size of an airplane; you might as well put wings on it and pilots in it. For liquid nitrogen, the winds generated by a fire would be more than sufficient to keep the nitrogen from providing any kind of smothering action, and given its volitility, I don't know if enough would penetrate to the seat of the fire to have a significant cooling effect. There's also the fact that liquid nitrogen is a hazardous substance that burns just as surely as fire and requires specialized storage, transportation, handling, and training. It would be a logistical and financial nightmare, as well as a constant safety hazard for the crews. Fires also create their own weather: updrafts, downdrafts, thunderstorm cells, funnel clouds, you name it. The bigger the fire, the bigger the weather system it creates. This already plays havoc with the winged aircraft (helicopters, tankers) and would certainly be ruinous to a blimp. The biggest problem I see with the fixed-wings (airplanes) used by the forest service is their age: most, if not all, are vintage WWII military surplus warhorses that had already been severely abused by at least one war when the forest service bought them some fourty or 50 years ago. IOW, we need new aircraft."
posted by Z at
11:34 PM
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