The same person that designed a new way to move water, in fire hose lined with high-voltage electrical wires, has designed a fire shelter with double walls which can be filled with water from a fire hose. His thinking is that since there is water in the lining of the tent walls, that the tent would survive being burned over, along with the terrified firefighters inside.
At the web site for this idea, the photo is described thusly:
The image above is a proposed water filled protective tent. Assuming that a firefighter is near a water filled hose in a hose relay, the tent can be filled with water from the hose. The water should provide good insulation from the heat of a fire in a burnover situation.
Off the top of my head, some of the issues include:
- Weight and size of the contraption. How would it be transported?
- Is this a single
victimperson shelter, or can it hold many people? If multiple firefighters have to inflate their shelters at the same time, I suppose they will simply wait in line for their turn to use the fire hose while the 200-foot wall of flames approaches. I guess we’ll throw out the requirement to deploy and enter your fire shelter within 20 seconds. - What are the chances of it being at the location where it might be needed?
- What happens if a hot ember lands on it while it is sitting on the ground uninflated?
- You could not really stage these ahead of firefighters on uncontained portions of fireline. If burnovers are possible, the fire is probably moving rapidly. Where would you put it? And carrying them with you while laying hose may not be practical.
- If you have a functional hose lay, the chances of needing any kind of fire shelter are reduced. Not completely, but to a degree.
- How long would it take to inflate the contraption with water? In that amount of time, firefighters might be able to use their escape route to get the hell out of the area.
- How stable would it be in the kind of wind that frequently precipitates rapid fire growth and burnovers?
- And, if a hot ember lands on it while it is inflated with water, will it really not be damaged? And what about direct flame impingement with temperatures of 1,472 to 2,192 degrees F?
- Would it be cost prohibitive?
- Would you bet your life on this contraption?
Guess where we’re filing this?
Get free M-113s from the LESO program and drive straight through fires laughing all the way. (Aberdeen Proving Ground did an M-60 too if you want to “go large”!)
Wheeled trucks will bog where tracks can easily traverse, and I defy you to pivot turn a fire engine!
Shelter in place under armor, and mount external conformal water tanks to feed your system of choice. A monitor could easily be controlled from inside by the track commander. External CO2 or compressed air cylinders could drive a foam system even with the engine off. No absolute requirement to put the goodies on an internal skid.
Which would you rather shelter in? The most successful APC in history (and which is still in service) or a portable shelter? Only one of those is designed to take a napalm hit.
You can also rescue stuck wheeled vehicles with relative ease.
I don’t get why the SWAT folks are all over M-113s they rarely use but the firefighting community doesn’t jump on these. Wheeled trucks are essentially roadbound, and even the best brush truck is a joke next to a track. There is a reason we put troops in armored boxes, and have them handy to RESCUE dismounted soldiers under attack.
First of all if I had an engine to fill this I think I would just drive away, and secondly how about designing an engine from the ground up, on it’s own designed chassis, instead of taking a truck frame and building it into an engine?
Steve, thanks for the ideas however missguided, If you want to develop something that actually will help us get with a firefighting group and ask them, ideas like the water tent are not practicle, and take to long to deploy, do more research with people actually doing the firefighting rather than theory.
Just a thought about this and other “lame-ass ideas” that occasionally surface from inventors offering inventions for the world of wildland fire: when I was the Program Leader for F&AM at the Missoula Technology & Development Center (the job that Leslie Anderson now holds), I got literally hundreds of “crazy ideas” (I regret not keeping them all – think about the book I could write!!). But one message came across loud and clear in almost all of the inventions sent into us: these folks, even if they did not understand out business, really cared about our safety and making our jobs easier. It’s hard sometimes not to laugh out loud about some of the proposals, or to not spend a few minutes reviewing their submissions: we do so at the risk of missing “the pony that is buried in the room full of horse manure” So let’s thank these “crazy inventors” for their efforts, and try to offer meaningful feedback to them that encourages their creative spirit and concern about our welfare. It took me a few years and lots of those crazy ideas to evolve to this position, but I believe it’s the right thing for us as a wildland firefighter community.
F*** that ! One more thing to have to carry with my line gear on top of it all I’m a EMT and already pack my medic stuff with my line gear. Oy yes lets just stem our self’s to death. You have any clue as to how dumb this is? Are you trying to cook us out there? I for one will not pack that ****.
You have to hand it to this guy, he is always trying to come up with something and has the stones to put his work up for comment and criticism from the wildland community. Regretablly, each idea seems to be worse that the last. Steamed to death in a free standing waterbed? No thank you. Back to the drawing board Steve.
Dear Firefighters,
Your less than enthusiastic reception to my power-wire-in-hose made me invent a better, simpler system. Thank you.
At http://www.electric-fluid-pipeline.com, I show a relay pumping system that has only telephone type wire pair embedded in the hose. Very Low voltage!
The pumps are now diesel powered, not electric powered.
By the way, water sometimes conducts electricity, but water provides good insulation from heat. It takes a lot of heat to raise the temperature of water.
I could be wrong… but I was always taught water was an excellent conductor…
Yep, I agree JMG…..One more thing to carry….Now upon my line gear my medic stuff, I’d have to carry this too….Can everyone just think bout what water does when heated? Not a good idea!
Oh good one more thing to carry.
So instead of our shake and bake shelters we now get to be steamed veggies? So what happens when all that water turns into steam? I agree with you. Meh!