Sonic firefighting technology shown at Bay Area fire training center

On Wednesday morning In Concord, firefighters witnessed the first demonstration in Northern California of a new technology that can put out fires using sound waves.

The equipment is still in the development stage, but it's sparking a lot of interest about how it can be applied in the future.

Water has always been the primary tool of firefighters for doing their jobs, so when they met at the ConFire Training Center, it may have seemed like a brave new world.

"It does go back to the science, you know, with the fire triangle," said Assistant Chief Chris Bachman. "If you disturb or remove the oxygen or the air, the fire will go out.  We've just always used water, you know, to extinguish fires. So, it's a unique concept, and I'm glad we were able to host this event today to see what the possibilities are."

That "unique concept" is using ultra-low sound waves as a way to extinguish a fire. It was just a theory until 2015, when a pair of students at George Mason University demonstrated the world's first sonic fire extinguisher.

The video they produced showing their bulky prototype blowing out flames ignited a whole new way of thinking about fire suppression. And in Concord, a company called Sonic Fire Tech showed off what it is capable of doing with a live demonstration of a simulated kitchen grease fire. A sensor near the ceiling recognizes the heat from a fire and then the sonic blast kicks in and the fire in the frying pan is reduced and then extinguished completely.  It sounded and felt like the equipment was blowing air, but that would only make the fire grow. Instead, the existing air in the room was being shoved around by the sonic waves.

"Wind is introducing new oxygen, right? So, we're taking the same oxygen molecules and vibrating them back and forth past the fire. So, it's trying to get ahold of them, and it can't. So, it goes out," said Geoff Bruder, the company's co-founder and CEO.

Bruder said the idea is to outfit new homes with heat sensors and sonic emitters, so every room is protected. One home destroyed in the Altadena fire is being rebuilt with sonic emitters as a pilot project for the technology. At this point, it is meant to supplement a normal water sprinkler system. The idea is, if the sonic blasters can stop a fire before the sprinklers kick in, it will avoid all the water damage that usually occurs during a small fire. Bruder thinks insurance carriers will be particularly interested in that possibility.  

But it also has wildland fire applications. The company showed off a backpack model that can be used by wildfire ground crews to put out small ember fires, but with one huge advantage.

"What they're using now is these 5-gallon water backpacks which run out pretty quickly, and then they have to have a water tanker follow them around so they can keep refilling them," said Bruder.  "Our system does the same thing but with a battery that lasts hours."

Fire Inspector Derrick Berumen was first in line to try out the backpack prototype. He hadn't even heard of it until a few days ago.

"No, this is new to me. We were told about it about a week ago, and we saw a brief video and it seemed pretty neat," he said. "We saw the backpack system go off, and I thought that was pretty interesting and I'm curious to see where it goes from here."

Everyone is curious about where it's all going. In fact, Bruder said the biggest challenge currently is to get people to view the product for what it can do today, rather than imagine what it may do in the future.

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