As the Greek myth goes– Prometheus the Titan stole stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to mankind, seeing as they were suffering from
the cold. God has punished him for this act by having him chained to a rock. Every day the heavenly eagle flied to Prometheus and pecked his liver,
thereby dooming him to eternal tortures.
Since then heavenly fire has spread to every part of the earth. Each person had a fireside at his home which kept him heated in the cold days of the
year, helped in cooking food, and warmth spread across the house. Prometheus, became the symbol of sacrifice and goodness.
But not always a similar idyll accompanied the life of a person. Occasionally the wrath of God reminded him of itself, and trouble kicked in. Fire
escaped from captivity of the furnace, and created terrible destruction.
In such moments people began to hate the heavenly fire, and the one who has brought it to this world. But enough with these lyrics.
The more time people spent fighting fires the more life experience they gathered: they invented mechanisms and fire extinguishing means, published
fire-prevention rules and instructions and created fire extinguishing services.
Eventually it paid off to build stone houses in cities and settlements as that in comparison to the wooden ones they were much more durable to fires
.
But the depressing statistics of fires tells us that it is necessary to improve the fire extinguishing means and training of the population with
elementary rules of the safe handling of fire.
Especially dangerous and economically expensive, in today's time, are wildfires. They arise as a result of natural phenomenon, human carelessness and
disorder.
The suppression of such fires, as a rule, is a very difficult thing to do, especially in remote places far from concentration of fire-prevention
equipment. In the path of such deadly fires are not only forests, but villages, settlements and cities.
In the world there are today more than 220 countries in which 6.9 billion people alive. In those countries there are annually 7-8 million fires in
which about 85-90 thousand people perish.
[U]I will give you an example[/U] - About a third, that is 200 of 600 million hectares of the Russian woods officially (!) are out of the fire
protection zone, and across this territory there are no reliable statistics about the quantity and spread of these fires.
These fires eventually become very large because of the difficult approachability for the fire-prevention equipment to places of ignition.
Therefore when not dumping enough of large amounts of water into the fire zone, and in the presence of strong wind – the flame only expands more.
The most effective method of fire suppression is the method in which the center of ignition loses access to oxygen which sustains the combustion. In
general these are foam generators. The foam produced by them envelops combustion products with a layer of the bubbles from the foam solution,
impenetrable for the oxygen in the air. If you cover a burning candle with a can, then the flame of candle will go out in only a few seconds.
But the most effective remedy of isolation of a flame from the oxygen in the air, is carbonic acid. As it will hit the fire zone, the flame will be
covered in a gaseous cloud, blocking for a short time the access of oxygen to the flame.
This day carbon dioxide is used in fire extinguishers, and not only in extinguishing flames, so it safe, and in comparison with water and foam acid
fire extinguishers, it is good at suppression of electrical wiring. It is good as an insulator of electricity.
But how to use such an effective remedy like carbonic acid, at suppression of large fires and local ignitions in premises where existence of carbon
dioxide fire extinguishers is limited because of their rather high cost and expensive production?
Dry carbonic acid (dry ice) is produced from liquid carbon dioxide . Inside a dry ice pelletizer, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded under
controlled conditions to form dry ice snow. This snow is then pressed through an extruder plate into round, hard pellets (elongated grains with a
diameter of 3 mm or 1.7 mm according to the used extruder plate) for dry ice blasting purposes or into larger pellets/dry ice slices/blocks for
cooling purposes.
This gas is not toxic and is applied to gassing of drinks.
For broad use of carbon dioxide gas with the purpose of fire extinguishing, it should be packaged in special containers, in the form of dry ice. Such
containers will be supplied with explosive elements that have the necessary power. The main task of the explosive –to spray the carbon dioxide gas
as much as possible in the surrounding space.
If the fire is an apartment, then the dry ice in the container has to be enough to neutralize the oxygen in the room, and the explosion has to be
small. If the person realizes that he cannot cope with the fire, then he throws a container with the gas into the room and closes the room’s
door.
The gas released from container will suppress flame in the room and in a small period of time it will be possible to come in the room, finish
extinguishing the smoldering ignition remains with the usual means.
In case of big ignitions in large territories, it will be necessary to use military aircraft, filled with containers of the necessary explosive power,
and the corresponding volumes of dry ice.
How it is supposed to look - In military warehouses at airfields there will be a stock of containers with carbon dioxide gas with different explosion
strength and volumes of the dry ice. If it is necessary to extinguish a forest, then the force of the explosion has to bring the gas to the tree tops
in a fire that is mostly in the tree tops.
If a field or a settlement burns, then the force of the explosion has to be small, but with the large volumes of carbon dioxide gas in the containers.
The containers themselves will be made of a decomposing material.
Small containers formed in big blocks, for fast loading into the airplane and their distributions on the inside. The system of automatic dumping of
the containers from the airplane in fire zones has to be thought over.
It is possible to assume how the whole process of fire extinguishing will proceed.
From the notification services, in the closest airfield to the location of the fire ,arrives information about a fire. Airplanes are loaded with the
blocks prepared earlier, with containers of the dry ice, the certain brand corresponding for suppression of a certain fire ( forest fire,* industrial
enterprises, etc.).
A group of airplanes flies to the fire covering significant ground in order to do “carpet bombing”.
Airplanes come into fire zone, considering the direction of the wind and its force. The load is dumped early so that the arisen wave of gas cloud will
crawl over the burning site.
The next wave should be ...(Continuation in the comment section)
edit on 14-3-2017 by OlegK because: Fixed the title