Speaker 1: Bushkin. This is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. Many many millions
Speaker 1: of gallons of retardants are used every year, ran the
Speaker 1: iconic red stuff you see being dropped from planes. In
Speaker 1: recent weeks, the Pacific coast has faced devastating wildfires. Because
Speaker 1: of climate change, uncontrolled fires have become increasingly frequent and
Speaker 1: increasingly destructive around the world, from Australia to Brazil to
Speaker 1: Oregon and California. But before they spread out of control,
Speaker 1: these fires often start in predictable places. I mean, we
Speaker 1: found that eighty percent plus of the fires in California
Speaker 1: over the last ten years have started routinely in the
Speaker 1: same sorts of hotspots. The familiar fire preventing strategies focused
Speaker 1: on giving fires less fuel by clearing flammable materials from
Speaker 1: around the home, keeping gutters and drains clear, and cutting
Speaker 1: down dead and dying trees. But as the planet grows
Speaker 1: hotter and fire seasons keep getting longer, we might be
Speaker 1: ready for a higher tech approach, something like Jello. For
Speaker 1: the lay person, it it looks and feels, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's not as stiff as jello. Eric Apple is a
Speaker 1: professor of material science and engineering at Stanford University. He
Speaker 1: and his team have designed new long lasting fire retardant
Speaker 1: with a gel like texture. It's sprayed over known hotspots
Speaker 1: before fires start. I believe that with the right technology
Speaker 1: in hand, this problem is solvable. I asked Apple why
Speaker 1: he's so passionate about this idea. He started by describing
Speaker 1: the sky outside his window. Right now. If I look
Speaker 1: out my window, I see a very brown sky. It
Speaker 1: looks like it's twilight, but you know, it's ten o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning. It should be bright and sunny. I mean,
Speaker 1: I grew up in California. I'm Californian for almost my
Speaker 1: entire life, and you know, I have many graduate students
Speaker 1: in my lab at Stanford that come here from all
Speaker 1: over the place, and they just sort of assume that
Speaker 1: it's normal. And I had to tell him no, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't remember this ever when I was growing up.
Speaker 1: I mean, you'd hear about fires every once in a
Speaker 1: while on the news, but it's certainly in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years has become a completely regular thing. So
Speaker 1: I can certainly understand your eagerness to help solve this
Speaker 1: problem solvable. About how you're going to do it, what's
Speaker 1: your solvable for dealing with these fires. Many, many millions
Speaker 1: of gallons of retardants are used every year, right the
Speaker 1: iconic red stuff you see me and dropped from planes,
Speaker 1: and that's really only ever used reactively. So once a
Speaker 1: fire has started, our main approach is trying to stop
Speaker 1: them before they start. Now, one of the limitations that
Speaker 1: we were trying to address is if you want to
Speaker 1: go and pretreat areas where you know fires are going
Speaker 1: to start. One of the primary limitations of the current
Speaker 1: retardants is that they don't stay where you put them.
Speaker 1: A high wind or heavy dew is enough to wash
Speaker 1: the retardants off the vegetation, so they stop working. So
Speaker 1: what we sought to do was to not create a
Speaker 1: new retardant, let's say, because we're using the same active
Speaker 1: fire retarding agent, but instead tweaking the performance additives so
Speaker 1: that the retardant stays on the vegetation throughout the duration
Speaker 1: of the fire season, So you can spray one time
Speaker 1: in June, let's say, and have protection against fire starts
Speaker 1: all the way through until the rainy season comes. So
Speaker 1: can you describe this stuff? What's it like? If you
Speaker 1: touch it? How does it feel? It's not quite a gel.
Speaker 1: A lot of people think of jello when they think
Speaker 1: of a gel, and it's not thick like that. It
Speaker 1: looks kind of like cream. Really. So what we developed
Speaker 1: an in my lab improves the adherents, so more of
Speaker 1: what you spray actually sticks on the vegetation, and it
Speaker 1: improves the durability. So it's really only once you get
Speaker 1: into the rating season that the materials will wash away
Speaker 1: and simply buy it a grade in the soil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the evidence in I mean, you know it works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it we did pilot scale studies to test it ourselves,
Speaker 1: and we tried to burn it. It was actually kind
Speaker 1: of fun because, you know, we would do the experiments
Speaker 1: and see that the fire would not actually ignite even
Speaker 1: through extensive weathering. So we ranged a half an inch
Speaker 1: on it and let it sit in the environment for
Speaker 1: six weeks the treated grass. It wouldn't burn, and so
Speaker 1: some of the folks that we were working with started
Speaker 1: just drawing funny faces in the grass with a torch
Speaker 1: because even if you took a torch to it, it it
Speaker 1: wouldn't ignite. Wow. Then we were able to step it
Speaker 1: up and actually do some full scale pilot studies and
Speaker 1: treated a number of roadside segments in southern California. Many
Speaker 1: of them are small, but every one of these ignitions
Speaker 1: requires crews to go out and put them out, so
Speaker 1: they use a lot of resources, They take up firefighters
Speaker 1: time that they could be spending doing things like controlled burns,
Speaker 1: and we reported that there were zero fires in the
Speaker 1: treated areas. Eric. This is a very targeted intervention, right.
Speaker 1: You don't need to treat the whole forest, You just
Speaker 1: go where the fire is most likely to happen. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I think that's an important misconception that I see a
Speaker 1: lot of places that you know, we're not talking about
Speaker 1: treating the entire forest like you would with a controlled burn.
Speaker 1: We're talking about treating only right where the fires are
Speaker 1: likely to start. And so if you envision a roadside
Speaker 1: where if you have a car that overheats and it
Speaker 1: pulls over into the grass right next to the roadway,
Speaker 1: or somebody throws a cigarette butt out of their window,
Speaker 1: it only lands right next to the roadway, and so
Speaker 1: you only have to treat right there. And what's beautiful
Speaker 1: about that is that, say, a twenty foot wide treatment
Speaker 1: protects all of the forest beyond it. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: cream that you're spraying is it? Is it safe or
Speaker 1: plants and trees and birds and animals and people. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's something about the look of that red stuff coming
Speaker 1: out of planes that I always think I would not
Speaker 1: like to be underneath it. Yeah, So we when we
Speaker 1: were developing this, we specifically designed it to be safe.
Speaker 1: That was one of the primary concerns, because anything you're
Speaker 1: putting out in the environment, you want to be one
Speaker 1: certain that it's safe and effective. We designed it using cellulos,
Speaker 1: so just plant matter and a thing called colloidal silica,
Speaker 1: which you can think of as nanosand so it's just
Speaker 1: primarily sand and cellulos. These are products that are already
Speaker 1: used in food products and pharmaceutical products, and so they're
Speaker 1: widely used, and we have a really good understanding of
Speaker 1: their environmental safety and their safety to plants and animal
Speaker 1: and fish. It sounds kind of obvious if the stuff
Speaker 1: there were spraying blows away, why not come up with
Speaker 1: some stuff that won't blow away? Is that? Why wasn't
Speaker 1: something like this tried before you got onto it. I
Speaker 1: think this is a great example of how innovation often
Speaker 1: takes place right at the intersection of fields. The majority
Speaker 1: of my lab actually focuses on drug delivery. You know,
Speaker 1: we're in the process of developing an HIV drug, trying
Speaker 1: to make it so that instead of needing to let's say,
Speaker 1: have an infusion of anti HIV antibodies once every two months,
Speaker 1: you can get instead of a single injection, and you
Speaker 1: would get nine months or a year's worth of protection.
Speaker 1: And what we were able to do here is apply
Speaker 1: that same sort of thinking. Right, this is really a
Speaker 1: delivery problem. The active FI retarding agent works great if
Speaker 1: it where it needs to be when it needs to
Speaker 1: be there. At risk of revealing my ignorance of chemistry,
Speaker 1: can you go a little further into how it works?
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess what I would understand that to mean.
Speaker 1: Is that something that's water soluble that would get dissolved
Speaker 1: if it rain is adhering to something that's not water soluble,
Speaker 1: like a like a gel or an oil. I mean,
Speaker 1: is that what's happening here? Yeah, So when people think
Speaker 1: of gels, they think of sort of wet, squishy stuff,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's the gel like nature that allows
Speaker 1: it to adhere better. But then once it dries into
Speaker 1: a film, you can think of it kind of like
Speaker 1: like nail polish or something like that, right, or paint
Speaker 1: where it dries into a film, but it's not it's
Speaker 1: not thick like paint, and it doesn't suffocate the plants
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It just it creates a more
Speaker 1: robust film. And so this is where I could nerd
Speaker 1: out all day on the polymer science of this. But
Speaker 1: one of the beautiful things about polymers because we use
Speaker 1: cellulosic polymers that are biover newable resources, and when they
Speaker 1: dry they sort of get all stuck together and entangled.
Speaker 1: The sort of go to thing when talking about what
Speaker 1: are polymers like, it's kind of like a bull of spaghetti.
Speaker 1: And so you can think of the longer the spaghetti,
Speaker 1: the more tied up they are with their neighbors, and
Speaker 1: the harder it is to grab one piece and pull
Speaker 1: it apart from the rest. And so in our case,
Speaker 1: we have these cellulose polymers and when they dry into
Speaker 1: a film, they end up holding on really tightly to
Speaker 1: the fiery tardant. So it just take it takes more water,
Speaker 1: more rainfall to get those films to dissolve away. That's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Your lab was focused on these time released delayed release
Speaker 1: mechanisms for something completely different. How did you get the
Speaker 1: idea to apply that to fire prevention? At family barbecue?
Speaker 1: Family barbecue? So, my brother in law, Jesse a stuff.
Speaker 1: He was the fire prevention forster for the state of
Speaker 1: Hawaii for many years, and it came about when we
Speaker 1: were talking. So he was the one that originally identified
Speaker 1: that fires routinely start in the same areas. He was
Speaker 1: the one that had the original idea to say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if we could only treat these areas beforehand, then we
Speaker 1: could stop them before they even start. To me, when
Speaker 1: we were talking about this, it was clear, oh, this
Speaker 1: is a controlled delivery problem. It's a great story. So
Speaker 1: firefighter meets material scientists, presumably over beers at a family barbecue. K.
Speaker 1: I know you've had time to test some of this
Speaker 1: work and coordinate a bit with cal fire. Was that
Speaker 1: retard you're talking about in place this spring? If we've
Speaker 1: seen the results with any of these awful fires that
Speaker 1: are going on right now. So the materials are now
Speaker 1: fully commercially available. They're being sold by the main company
Speaker 1: that produces all of the fire retardants that you see
Speaker 1: being dropped out of planes and whatnot. The product is
Speaker 1: actually called Pause Check Fortify, and it is their sort
Speaker 1: of premiere product for fire prevention. And so I believe
Speaker 1: the company has been conducting projects in various places around
Speaker 1: the state. For like we mentioned before, this targeted prevention
Speaker 1: of wildfires in hotspots that are known to cause a
Speaker 1: lot of fires. But were we too late for this
Speaker 1: year or is this stuff being it's too late to
Speaker 1: use it now? So unfortunately probably not. Over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, the fall has been really the most
Speaker 1: severe part of the season. We do need to be thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, at the individual level, at the community level,
Speaker 1: of ways that we can be mitigating fires, especially in
Speaker 1: these areas that are near where a lot of people live,
Speaker 1: because they're the ones that have the greatest chance to
Speaker 1: cause the most death and destruction. Yeah, I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: these fire crews are you know, fully occupied, and then
Speaker 1: some right now that they don't have much capacity to
Speaker 1: work on preventive measures. Next year, the fires are gone.
Speaker 1: At some point, fire season will be over and there
Speaker 1: will be a break. Do you have big plans for
Speaker 1: next year? Yes? Absolutely, I mean, and that's where you know,
Speaker 1: firefighters recognize this. I mean they are very clear on
Speaker 1: what needs to be done during the off season, but
Speaker 1: a lot of other people sort of forget about fires
Speaker 1: during the off season. And I think it's important to
Speaker 1: realize that as we recognize the fire seasons are getting
Speaker 1: more and more and more severe, more time and more
Speaker 1: money needs to be put into mitigation efforts to rejuvenate
Speaker 1: our healthy relationship with the forest to help set us
Speaker 1: up for greater success going into the fire season. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds super exciting, Eric, but we're not seeing it
Speaker 1: reduced fires currently. Right. Are we at a turning point
Speaker 1: around deploying prophylaxis, as you say, as a strategy, I
Speaker 1: think so absolutely. And really, what we've developed is a tool.
Speaker 1: We don't want to stop all fires. Fires healthy for
Speaker 1: the forest, and so what we really hope is that
Speaker 1: this technology that we've developed can help prevent fires in
Speaker 1: the places that pose the greatest danger to people and
Speaker 1: property and at the same time support efforts to build
Speaker 1: a healthier relationship with the forest. Right, the materials that
Speaker 1: we've developed can be leveraged during control burn efforts, for example,
Speaker 1: to make them faster and more efficient and more effective
Speaker 1: and protect older mature trees, protect infrastructure, that may be
Speaker 1: in the forest, and in some ways the materials that
Speaker 1: we've can help those efforts. We'd like to end the
Speaker 1: show by asking for suggestions for things listeners can do
Speaker 1: to help with this problem. Obviously, we know from Smokey
Speaker 1: Bear that only they can prevent forest fires, but you know,
Speaker 1: beyond that, what can people in California and I guess
Speaker 1: not in California do to help with this terrible tragedy
Speaker 1: we see. One is be really cognizant of your surroundings.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a lot of accidental fire starts
Speaker 1: that could have been mitigated, Like just thinking about forest
Speaker 1: fire is being something that that is a huge risk.
Speaker 1: Another one is I would encourage people really to pursue
Speaker 1: creating defensible spaces around their homes. So it's creating a
Speaker 1: one hundred foot barrier, making sure that leaves and excess,
Speaker 1: you know, potential fuels are removed from your roofs or
Speaker 1: gutters or just from around the house in the first place.
Speaker 1: And also, I mean every county, every I guess maybe
Speaker 1: even not just at the county level, a fire safe
Speaker 1: councils that are sort of mixtures of fire personnel as
Speaker 1: well as local landowners but more engagement in those sorts
Speaker 1: of things would be really helpful. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of policies that really, I guess are not as helpful
Speaker 1: for incentivizing people to be as fire safe as possible,
Speaker 1: and so even talking to your local and state representatives
Speaker 1: about investing more into these sort of fire prevention opportunities.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's as much buy in as there
Speaker 1: could be or should be. So many people forget about
Speaker 1: wildfire season, you know, during the five or six months
Speaker 1: in the off season, and we need to be more prepared.
Speaker 1: Eric Apple is a professor of material science and engineering
Speaker 1: at Stanford University. Remember to check out our show notes
Speaker 1: for links to suggestions for ways that you can reduce
Speaker 1: fire risks and learn more about wildfire prevention. Solvable is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our show is produced
Speaker 1: by Camille Baptista, Senior Producer, Jocelyn Frank. Katherine Girardou is
Speaker 1: our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Heather Fain, Eric Sandler, Harley Mgliori, and Kadijahaled.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Weisberg.