How to Kill a Zombie Fire

That’s as a result of deluging a zombie isn’t assured to rapidly kill it. Say you’re pumping large portions throughout a peatland, like firefighters did in North Carolina. That doesn’t imply the water is getting to the fitting locations because it trickles underground. “It creates a channel, and the fire in that channel is suppressed, but then the water doesn’t go anywhere else,” Rein says. Other elements of the hearth can fester untouched. And so the zombie lives on.

If firefighters don’t have sufficient water at their disposal, they could strive compacting the soil with heavy equipment in a bid to lower off the hearth’s oxygen provide. But that tools shouldn’t be at all times accessible to a crew. Even then, such a maneuver is harmful work, because it requires driving over an energetic hearth. Also, these fires may be big, and heavy equipment can solely cowl a lot floor.

So within the lab, Rein and his colleagues experimented with a novel anti-zombie weapon: water combined with a unhazardous, available fire-extinguishing surfactant, also called a wetting agent or suppressant. “It’s a little bit actually like soap—it just reduces the surface tension of the water and allows the water to penetrate better into a porous medium,” says Rein. “Peat is a porous medium.”

Using a small, custom-built “peat reactor,” which was filled with the plant materials and lined with ceramic insulators, they may set a zombie hearth and monitor it because it burned. Above the field they located a nozzle to spray both common water or their particular mix on totally different fires. Compared to the identical quantity of plain water, the water with surfactant lower the time wanted to extinguish the blaze by 40 p.c. Thanks to that decreased floor rigidity, as an alternative of making channels, the combination extra uniformly penetrated the soil, so little patches of zombie hearth had nowhere to cover.

It wasn’t that the surfactant had some form of chemical impact on the hearth—for example, by reducing oxygen ranges. Instead it was extra of a thermal impact, “in the sense that the surfactant allows the water to reach more hot spots and reach them faster,” says Rein.