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