Bradley, its pleasure to meet you Brother. The answer to your question is Yes the CAFS foam has been the most tested fire service product ever used by the Forest Service and Land Management Organizations. Actually its the foam concentrates that are selected for use in the CAFS hardware that have been tested in the Labs and in the fields. I was working for the Texas Forest Service in 1976 when I developed the first foam equipment and at that time I had to use Dawn Dish detergent which was not approved for any type of fire fighting anywhere. But no one seemed be concerned at that time about soap on the forest. Our horticulturist department was located in the same compound as the fire service so I went over and asked the scientists if they would have a look at some of the fire fighting foaming agents that I had used in the oilfield fires. They tested 9 different chemicals and determined that each of them were biodegradable and safe for the application I would be using them for. The US Forest Service came to a demonstration of my foam fire equipment and said they did not want any foam used in their territory. So my Boss told me to stop using foam. I went to work trying to find an environmentally chemical that would allow me to continue the development of the foam systems. I found that the waste product of the paper mills was being allowed to be dumped into the streams was an excellent foaming and wetting agent. But I was told not to use foam, so I changed the name of my project to a Water Expansion System (WES). And invited the US Forest Service management back for a look at the new wetting agent application system that expanded water. They could not resist seeing how the heck I expanded water. The system I used was even larger than the earlier foam demo we did for them and when I explained that the white stuff was 99.5% water with an environmentally friendly soap, that everyone was familiar with, and added friendly air to inflate the surface area of the wet water, they were satisfied and approved the application for fighting fire in the forests. The Chief of the Forest Service had to add his comments and he told me that it looked great to him but it looked an awful lot like foam. So the moral of the story is everyone that has seen the foam is concerned that it isnt water and so it must not be used to fight fire. Since that time every agency has chosen their foaming agents from a long list of approved chemicals to be used for fighting fire anywhere that combustion is destroying the vegetation and exposing the public to the carcinogens in the smoke. After I started selling foam units to the Bureau of Land Management I changed the name again to the Compressed Air Foam System (CAFS) to simplify contract descriptions to stop having to explain what a Water Expansion System was. So now after that long story of the history of Foam in the Forest, the major chemical companies and some not so major are producing foaming agents with a lot of confusing explanations of what their stuff is and how safe it is to use. I have used every brand and type of foam that I could get a sample of and have found that it is mostly all made with the same ingredients. There is no such thing as class A and class B, its a marketing scheme just like the dish washing soap salesmen use. Some is definitely better than others and some even buy their foaming agents from their competitors and water it down and resell it as their own brand. So, what ever you use will make the water penetrate deeper and spread farther to make the water extinguish a whole lot more fire than using plain water without the bubbles.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:14:27 +0000
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