Could Promising Fire Suppression System Be a Game-Changer?

Wildfires are growing more intense and are more commonly erupting in the wildland interface, destroying homes and lives. Progress over the past several decades at mitigating these fires has been slow.

There are advances in cameras that use artificial intelligence to help firefighters get a jump on a fire and get resources there. But too often, fires are out of control quickly, as firefighters battle from both the ground and the air with fire retardant.

But what if you replaced that retardant with a suppression chemical that put the fire out immediately? You could then create safe spaces for firefighters on the ground who are threatened by fast-moving fires and create escape routes by having a “firetruck in the sky.”

That’s the brainchild of Larry Sukay, a former firefighter and fire chief, who started Western States Fire, the company developing SKHI-EX, an aerial suppression system that uses an expanding foam that the company says is multiple times more efficient than what’s currently being used.

Eddie Sell, fire chief of the Hemet, Calif., Fire Department and president of the California Firefighters Association, said this type of innovation is “long overdue” when it comes the government’s approval process.

“It’s time for a paradigm shift toward our decades-long approach of managing and mitigating wildfires,” Sell wrote in an email. “Government firefighting agencies at all levels, the science and education community, the business community, and elected officials must collaborate on a new approach to developing and implementing modern wildfire preventing and mitigation strategies.”

Sukay spent many years watching fire victims sifting through what was left of homes after wildfires turned nearly everything, including “their beloved pets,” to ash.

That’s when he got the idea of a suppression system, one that he had personally witnessed back east where it was used on coal fires and one fire at a five-story building where, he said, the foam kept the fire from gutting the whole structure.

The SKHI-EX system drops 50,000 cubic feet of foam per minute for up to 14 minutes and, in one pass, can put in more than 8,000 feet of fire line, as compared to up to 900 feet by dropping water from a helicopter, Sukay said.

“The foam is plant-based and environmentally safe for humans, animals, aquatic life and firefighters, with no chemicals to create exposure,” he said.

While he had originally envisioned spraying the foam from fire trucks, after the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., Sukay rethought his system and pictured connecting it to a helicopter, “where we would go from the bucket brigade to sustained fire suppression from the sky.”

“Our goal is to put a fire truck in the sky with a hose line that will come down and put suppression directly on the fire — instead of putting just a retardant, [it’s] a suppression.”

The company is currently gathering funding for the full-scale prototype it hopes to test by 2025.