Drones, Balloons and Sound Waves: New Ways to Fight the World’s Fires

As climate change makes fires worse, hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into novel ways to find and contain them.

… Another new technology promises to put out fires by disrupting their oxygen supply. Incaendium Initiative Corp., a private company doing business as Sonic Fire Tech, uses an acoustic generator to pump low-frequency infrasound waves into a building through concealed ceiling ducts the moment the system detects a flame. This causes oxygen molecules to vibrate, making it impossible for the fire to consume the gas, which is essential for combustion. Developed from principles discovered at NASA, the technology is more expensive to install than sprinklers, but it’s independent of the water supply, which can fail, as it did in the Eaton fire in Los Angeles County last year.

It was that disaster that brought Remington Hotchkis, Sonic’s head of commercialization, into the firefighting business. As the flames came roaring off the mountains spewing embers, Hotchkis had rushed to help relatives evacuate their house in Altadena. He was profoundly struck by the devastation. “I had recently sold a house there,” he says. “It was the house where I’d raised my kids. Any of those destroyed houses, that could have been me.” In the wake of the Eaton fire, he joined Sonic, which is developing an exterior system intended to establish a protective envelope around a house. Sonic says it has sold more than 40 in-house systems and has commitments for a further 1,200. The company has also distributed 100 backpack versions of the tech to firefighters to test in real-event conditions.