FireRein: Prevent, protect, extinguish

Quincy Emmons, a fire captain with Stone Mills Fire Department, had heard about a new firefighting technology: a fire suppression gel. The gel was sold as a powder requiring a mixing process taking up to five minutes or longer. Emmons and a friend devised a system minimizing mixing time down to 30 seconds and were in discussion with the company about Canadian distributorship.

Peter Sells, a retired district chief of Toronto Fire Services, wrote a regular column for Fire Fighting In Canada magazine. The editor contacted Sells with questions from a graduate student doing market research on behalf of a firefighting gel company. Sells answered the student’s questions, then contacted the company about possible investment and Canadian distributorship.

Emmons and Sells crossed paths and combined their efforts, forming FireRein in 2014 with Emmons’ existing partners. Two key principles guided their work: the firefighting gel product had to work with existing firefighting equipment, and it had to be safe enough to eat.

Those two principles were difficult to reconcile. Early formulations of FireRein Eco-Gel™ had a tendency to settle, like organic peanut butter. This settling needed to be compensated for by the use of mixers, which violated the principle of compatibility with existing fire equipment. They knew that fire departments wouldn’t adopt a difficult-to-use product, but keeping the formulation 100-per cent bio-based without settling wasn’t a trivial matter. According to Sells, “We could have resolved the settling issue by including synthetic chemical components, but that would have taken away from our mission and not differentiated us from the competition.”

Early adopters in Eastern Ontario included fire departments, a paper packaging plant and a plastic waste re-purposing plant. Product development efforts continued; in 2019, FireRein employed a science team headed by a PhD chemist to finalize product development, resulting in a stable hydrogel concentrate that is certified 100-per cent bio-based through UL Environment and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. FireRein engaged two distributors, Municipal Equipment in Ontario and Wholesale Fire & Rescue (WFR) in Alberta, to represent Eco-Gel™ to fire departments. Industrial sales expanded, including a gold mine in northern Ontario. Discussions are continuing with several large industrial plants in eastern Ontario. FireRein’s motto, “PREVENT • PROTECT • EXTINGUISH”, plays on the ability of Eco-Gel™ to stick and stay in place, acting as a cooling medium while excluding oxygen. Eco-Gel™ can be used to coat a patch of ground or a row of structures in advance of a wildfire, preventing propagation of the flames; it can be applied to protect internal or external exposures at the scene of a structure fire; and, of course, it can be directly applied to extinguish burning Class A or Class B materials. In 2019, FireRein began developing HotWorx™, a spray can filled with pre-mixed Eco-Gel™ intended to prevent fires caused by hot work such as welding, cutting, or grinding. Hot- Worx™ sales in retail stores, automotive distributors and light industry are growing quickly.

Products in development

KitchenWorx™ is a spray can containinga modified version of Eco- Gel™ formulated specifically to suppress oil and grease fires in home and commercial kitchens. According to Emmons, “KitchenWorx™ will suppress a small cooking fire quickly and safely, without contaminating the kitchen with ABC powder or any other undesirable agent. Commercial kitchens can avoid the activation of automatic systems which could lead to expensive cleanup and down time.” KitchenWorx™ will be available in Q2 of 2020.

FireRein’s Fire Prevention Pump (FPP) is a compact system designed to deploy Eco-Gel™ through a standard pressure washer device. A homeowner could coat their house if threatened by wildfire, or it could be used in industry to create a layer of Hydrogel across a wide area for fire protection or dust mitigation.

Eco-Sand™ will be a dry granular concentrate version of Eco-Gel™, intended for indefinite storage in austere desert heat or Arctic cold environments.

Once the required certifications are obtained, FireRein anticipates that Eco-Gel™ will be a valuable tool in combatting wildfires. One agent, capable of being dropped from aircraft for suppression or as a retardant, or being applied by ground crews for structure protection, all while being completely benign to plants, animals and water systems, may sound like a Holy Grail, but that is the FireRein quest. v