Firefighting aircraft have been key in California’s battle against the wildfires raging in Los Angeles over the past week. An array of aerial firefighters have dropped thousands of gallons of red fire retardant liquid on LA in recent days, but have you ever wondered what all that liquid might do to a car?
Firefighters tackling the blazes in Los Angeles drop the vibrant red liquid on areas to both extinguish fires and prevent new blazes from cropping up. The liquid coats flammable materials in a substance that helps prevent ignition and can starve ongoing fires of fuel or oxygen, which are both essential to keeping a fire from burning.
With each drop, aerial firefighters can drop as much as 19,600 gallons of firefighting liquid in one go, and that can cause a lot of damage to anything caught in the path.
In a video, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection demonstrated exactly what could happen to a car that’s caught in the path of one of its aerial firefighters.
The clip features a firefighting Grumman S-2 aircraft, which can drop around 800 gallons of firefighting goop with each pass, and a first-generation Ford Expedition, which has enough space in the trunk for around 100 gallons of firefighting liquid.
While flying low above the Hemet-Ryan firebase in California, the aircraft drops its load onto the Expedition with almighty force. The 9,000 lb load smashes into the side of the SUV, knocking it over to one side and caving in the roof.
Once the dust has settled on the display, the entire rear quarter of the SUV is destroyed, the windshield has popped out and the driver-side doors have been blown open by the impact. It’s a pretty bleak scene and shows the force that these aerial firefighters are playing with when they work to save communities from fires.
The drop used in this demonstration is also comparatively small for firefighting aircraft at just 9,000 pounds. In contrast, firefighting planes like the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Boeing 737 are able to dump up to 170,000 pounds of firefighting liquid in a matter of seconds.
It’s for this reason that fire services call for evacuations in areas that they are working on, as the risk of serious injury if you’re caught up in a drop is very high.
If you want to find out more about the efforts of aerial firefighters in California, head here to learn what makes up the red liquid they dump on forest forest fires. Or head here to see some of the biggest firefighting aircraft that teams have at their disposal.
