Cool heads
That last requirement is perhaps even greater since, besides direct attack, the MFC can be used as a preventative spray as well as part of post-fire wetting down.
As any firefighter will tell you, after a large wildfire, fires can smoulder underground for days or even weeks after the main fire has been brought under control and extinguished, with the attendant risk of reignition.
Besides firefighting, Haram and his team have found secondary uses for the MFC in flood recovery and in the event of a nuclear power plant meltdown.
“We saw this in Fukushima and Chernobyl, where helicopters were used to make bucket drops on reactors to cool them. We also face the associated exposure of the flight crews to such events, whereas with the MFC you just need to place them once and leave, since most reactor designs rely on water for cooling.”
In normal operations, nuclear reactors are generally built near or adjacent to bodies of water. The obvious question is, while the benefits are clear, aren’t options limited when there isn’t a supply of water within range?
It’s something that Haram and his team have studied extensively. Working with a geodata company and using Norway as an example, they discovered that in the south and central areas of the country, about 70% of the land is within 500 metres of a useful water source, whether a lake or a river.
The part of the country that suffers most from wildfires has an even higher coverage, reaching up to 80%.
It’s one thing to have an idea and imagine how it might improve things, but it is quite another to actually make things happen, to bring them to market.
“I’m a helicopter pilot,” says Haram, “and I didn’t know anything about business, but I was lucky that I live in Norway, where we have something called Innovation Norway and Vindel, which help out young companies with how to structure themselves, how to apply for development grants and so forth.
“We were also fortunate enough to win an entrepreneur competition run by a Norwegian bank called Sparebanken Møre, all of which gave me the funds I needed to build and test a prototype as a stand-alone and with a helicopter.”
