Recently, large-scale forest fires have been occurring frequently worldwide. In forest fires, the use of the firefighting foam has greatly improved fire extinguishing effects, but the environmental impact from firefighting activities using foam still cause concerns. We have been developing a novel firefighting foam for forest fire with significantly lower environmental risk, consisting of soaps, chelating agent, and diluents. We determined the optimal composition of soap, and found the high biodegradable chelating agent with a high foaming performance.
A variety of chemicals including foaming agents are used to aid in the protection of forest resources from the wild land fires. The fire-fighting foams (FFFs) are formulations composed principally of surfactants. As a part of Japanese national project, environmentally inert FFFs have been developed. There is an emerging need for testing the impacts of these FFFs on the living organisms composing the typical landscapes or eco-systems in Japan. In the present report, we aimed to describe our latest attempt for assessing both the short-tem and long-term impacts of FFFs in aquatic (fresh water) and semi-aquatic (wetland) eco-systems, by employing the laboratory-sized model assays (preliminary studies) and the biotope-based observation, respectively. In the biotope assays which was based on the observation in compact biotopes mimicking the fresh water environments and wetland, both the acute and long-term eco-toxic impacts of two FFFs (soap-based and synthetic detergent-based) were assessed. Spraying of synthetic detergent-based foam formula was shown to be more toxic compared to soap-based formula and mock water treatment.
Impact of wild-land fires to the ecosystem is highly complex. Damages to the ecosystem can be attributed not only to the direct impact of fire and release of toxic post-combustion gasses but also to the spraying of fire-fighting chemicals. Fire-fighting foam (FFF) agents are frequently applied for controls in wild-land fires including forest fire. However, effects of FFFs on the composition of the post-combustion gasses and the phytotoxicity of smoke derived from burning woods have not been determined to date. In the present study, with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), we have analyzed the chemical composition of the gasses derived from wood slices exposed to two distinct manners of combustion, namely, smoldering (gradual combustion without flame) and rapid burning (combustion with flame). Tested samples include slices of Japanese cedar, Japanese cypress, and Western hemlock. The amount of hydrocarbons, detected in the post-combustion gas such as methane, ethane, ethylene, propane, hexane, formaldehyde, acrolein and phenol, were higher in the gasses from smoldered samples. The major hydrocarbon found in the post-combustion gases processed in the presence of pilot flame was methane. Other hydrocarbons were hardly detectable. Addition of FFFs, namely, a soap-based FFF (designated as MK-08) and a detergent co cocktail-based FFF (Phos-chek) onto wooden slices resulted in slight increase in other hydrocarbons in the gasses derived from flame-driven combustion of wood slices. Interestingly, addition of Phos-chek drastically elevated the phytotoxicity of post-combustion gas derived from Western hemlock slices heated in the presence of pilot flame when assessed using the suspension cultured tobacco cells. In contrast, the soap-based FFF tested here did not alter the phytotoxicity of the post-combustion gasses, suggesting that soap-based FFF might minimize the impact of the fire-fighting activity to the living plants consisting the ecosystem in the forests and wild-land.
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