Fighting Fires Naturally

Fighting Fires Naturally

Fighting Fires Naturally. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture. The northwest has had more than its share of wildfires this season taking forests, farmland and homes with it. Now and ag scientist has come up with an all natural compound that may help save homes. Gary Glenn of the Agricultural Research Service in Albany, CA explains that several fire fighting compounds were combined. GLENN: We became interested in taking materials that were very inexpensive and that were renewable and trying to combine those into a gel. Sodium bentonite is a clay material. This material is used for many practical applications, one of them being kitty litter. By itself, sodium bentonite absorbs about 10 times it’s weight in water and so the idea is if you have a gel that absorbs water that that gel can then be applied to the surface of a structure and the water is where you need it. He says that by itself it has some inherent problems. GLENN: The problem with sodium bentonite is that as it starts to dry it will shrink and it will crack and expose whatever is underneath it. So that is where the starch came into play. So we combined the sodium bentonite with the starch and we got a really surprising result. We got a very nice film and that film kept the cracks from forming in the gels surface. And the other advantage was that as that film formed it reduced the evaporation rate of the gel. It can give fire fighters an extra 30 minutes of time to work on saving the structures. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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