It's a new kind of fire retardant that could have a huge impact
on how we fight fires.
Why do this?
Well, the answer to that question
is obvious to anyone living in California,
Oregon, Washington, Australia,
Colorado, Texas, or
anywhere else that's constantly on fire these days.
- Every year for the last five years,
we've had a record fire year, and it keeps going up.
It's a big, big problem.
It's a global problem.
- The fire service has a tradition
of not changing very fast.
- I've had to accept limitations, and learn to overcome them.
How can we change it?
Where can we take this? What's possible?
We looked at the firefighting industry the same way.
We're deploying a better bullet to fight the enemy.
- Stronger water won't solve all of our problems,
but it might solve a really big one.
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
- Ground zero for shenanigans.
Here's the worst beating I ever took from a wave in my life —
Outer Reef in Oahu —
that's my little head,
almost killed me, again.
- This is Jeff Denholm.
He's the man who is single-handedly
changing the way we fight fires.
For context, he does everything single-handedly
because, uh, turns out working on a
commercial fishing boat is very dangerous.
- Summer '93, I was working on a "dragger" fishing for cod
in the Bering Sea, and we were in a really heavy storm.
I slipped backwards and my arm went into the drive shaft
of this processing equipment and it sucked me in,
destroyed my arm.
Managed to survive 21 hours on the boat
before being medevacked off the ship.
- Losing his arm meant Jeffrey had to reinvent
his whole approach to surfing and outdoor sports in general.
His whole life, really. That's not easy.
- Oh, might be a little dark.
Got a workshop,
I'm constantly working on prosthetics.
And in this case, I've set up here with a paddle blade
that's for paddle boarding.
Losing a limb is a 'hard reset.’
It's taught me to be
resourceful, to adapt, to overcome.
I have a creative mind, a spatial mind,
and certainly with, you know, the loss of my arm,
the things that were important to me,
the athletic things were important to me,
drove me towards innovation.
- Jeffrey's adaptability is about a lot more
than just creative prosthetics.
He didn't accept the limitations
that other people had imagined for him.
Even after his accident, Jeff was able to continue
his career as a professional outdoor athlete,
as well as a wildland firefighting contractor,
which brings us to the next big challenge
he decided to tackle.
- Through my engagement in that business,
I recognized that the industry was in need
of innovation, that we were getting our butts kicked.
The most widely used retardant today
is a product called PHOS-CHEK,
and it's typically deployed from fixed-wing airplanes.
It's hazardous to waterways and kills fish.
I saw it as an opportunity,
certainly as an environmentalist,
I want to jump in
and try to create an alternative to the status quo.
I had a buddy at Patagonia ask what I'm doing
and I said,
"Can you believe they're dropping this red retardant
from the sky, that it's not putting the fires out,
it kills fish in streams, and seems like we can do better."
And he's like, "What are you gonna do about it?"
- Well, what he did about it
was put in years of work to find the people,
money, and chemistry needed for a better alternative.
- It's a water enhancement technology.
It doesn't contain any oils, surfactants,
and it's fully biodegradable.
The gel wraps and clings and smothers
and robs the fire of oxygen.
We're getting water to stick and stay where the heat is.
It just exponentially increases
the suppression capacity of water
by at least 10x we've proven in testing.
- Firefighting is a profession
that is slow to embrace change,
but right now things really do need to change.
- So you talk to firemen up to 30 years ago,
and they didn't fight wildfires like we do today.
The wildland fires of today are greater intensity
than they've ever been before.
The sheer size and the amount of acreage that we can burn
in one fire is up into the millions.
- San Bernardino is the largest county in California.
It's actually the largest county in the entire U.S.
It's bigger than Rhode Island,
but then who isn't?
I don't know what that means.
Anyway, they also have
one of the largest fire management problems.
That's why they're eager to try out
something like Strong Water.
- 20, 30 years ago, if you lost a structure,
that was a pretty big deal.
Now it's not, ‘If we're gonna lose the structure,’
it's, ‘How many structures will we lose
before we actually stop the fire from progressing?’
Spraying water on the homes
before the fire front gets there really isn't
an effective method because the radiant heat from the fire
will dry the water out before the fire gets to it.
So this gel allows us to keep that barrier of water there
through the fire front.
- Strong Water makes it easier for firefighters
on the ground,
spraying the gel before the fire gets there,
and before the firefighters themselves are in any danger.
It's also compatible with helicopters,
which can't normally use corrosive fire retardants.
It creates whole new possibilities
for quickly responding to fires as they're detected.
- ‘This is f***in’ Smith Grade.
This is Smith Grade, my f***in’ driveway.’
- A couple years back,
Jeffrey's town was threatened by wildfires,
and there simply weren't enough resources
to protect the whole area.
- You can see the burn scars on the trees right here.
- In the midst of the CZU Lightning Complex fire
in Santa Cruz County,
Jeff was able to utilize Strong Water to save a local winery
along with several other neighbors' homes.
- It was probably like 10 days straight
of engagement that I was in.
I lost track because I was sleeping three hours a night,
but I coughed —
I mean, we all did.
I mean, I had shit in my lungs for three months.
- That was uh yeah —
Still a little PTSD thinking about it,
having the experience with,
you know, facing things like that.
- Whenever I ran into people, I'm like,
"Where have you seen it?"
"What road was it on?"
- We do make rosé out of our vineyards.
This year we didn't have any option
'cause the smoke had destroyed all the grapes.
- You lost everything.
- Yup.
- So you missed a whole year.
- But, we still got our houses,
still got the winery. So there was,
I think there was more gain than loss.
Thanks for saving the house, man.
- You got it.
- So, picture a scenario where
a network of helicopters
or even drones were tanked up with a substance
like Strong Water, where fires
could be responded to effectively
as soon as they were detected.
A rapid response network like this is totally
within the realm of the possible.
Helicopter and drone launch sites
have a much smaller footprint than the
kinds of airports that are needed for water bombers,
so it's much more feasible to have them distributed
across a large area.
- Our product's made for direct flame engagement.
The goal is to have a crew load it up —
we have a mix station that our company runs
like a pit crew that will load a tank
that helicopters will be able to come to
and draw the material out and rotate to the fire and drop.
- Putting out fires quickly isn't enough.
We still need to address the buildup of fuel in our forests,
something that can only be done safely
with cutting-edge AI and prescribed burns.
See our next video about that.
But this is still something we need to do in the near term
if we want to avoid the kinds of tragedies
we're seeing more and more of.
- It's funny, I had a surgeon in Seattle
after my surgery, came in and he said,
"Jeff, a lot of stuff's going through your head right now
and I know you're a young guy” —
26 years old when I lost my arm.
And he said, "It's just not that complicated."
He goes, "You either go up,
or you let this take you down.
It's on or off, you just gotta make a decision."
And he goes, "I think you're gonna go up."
It's just about completely erasing the noise,
and focusing on going the right direction —
and that is up.
- Come back next time for another episode
of "Hard Reset."
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