We Need A Better Way Of Fighting Forest Fires

We’ve all seen it in the news that forest fires have run rampant. Whether it’s the Amazon, or here in my home province of British Columbia, fires are ravaging our forests; in 2017, 1.2 Million hectares of forests were burned down in British Columbia.

Currently, we’re fighting forest fires with these things…

But why? Not only do they consume fuel, they require pilots; need to be flown from a water source to the fire; and there’s only a finite amount of planes that can cover a finite amount of area.

There’s got to be a better way. The idea is going to sound way out there, but stay with me…

At first, I was toying with the idea of re-purposing MIRV rockets to fight forest fires. What’s a MIRV? It’s a multiple independent re-entry vehicle. In laymen terms, it’s a missile that carries a bunch of other missiles. It kind of looks like this. Now you see that area where it looks like some mushroom clouds are forming from the fall out of deploying nuclear warheads?

Well, instead of that, you fire off missiles that carry a flame retardant payload — carbon dioxide, carbon tetra-chloride, aluminum hydroxide…

So the result is a shock wave that pushes the fire off the trees (fuel) and the retardant suppresses any additional flames that might still be burning.

That was my initial idea… Except it would be hard to launch these missiles near any civilian zone, among the myriad of other problems — what if the payload doesn’t detonate, et al.

Which led me to my second idea!

What if instead of using planes and helicopters, we used something that is able to stay in one place and just sends out an army of drones that drop flame retardant payloads.

There was a rad company called Aeros that created the Aeroscraft

This vehicle is massive. Wait wait, let me reinforce that last statement. This vehicle is MASSIVE. You know how big a Boeing 747 is? This vehicle has a larger carrying capacity than that sucker.

So now imagine 5 of these badboys hovering over a forest fire and deploying fire fighting drones… You remember that April fools joke for Amazon delivery drones?

That crude drawing above is a rigid airship that’s carrying thousands of these drones, dropping thousands of flame retardant bombs. Cameras and sensors on the ship are able to detect what environment it’s in and through an algorithm, assess the best deployment strategy to maximize fire suppression while minimizing damage and loss of surrounding infrastructure.

Do you remember that episode of Black Mirror when swarms of bee drones were killing people? Well if you ignore all of that pessimistic horror, and focus instead on how cool it is to have swarm technology that operates on the cloud, capable of collaborative activities, we’ve got something cool on our hands!

In short, the future of combating forest fires could be done with a fleet of solar powered rigid airships, capable of VTOL, carrying smart drones that work in tandem to drop fire retardant payloads, flying back to the mother ship to reload and redeploy.

What do you think? Possible? Or way out there?