For more than 30 years, Clarence Grady, foaming systems manager for Pierce Manufacturing Co., has been in fire protection, starting in a volunteer fire department in Oregon. He has a degree in fire protection and served as both a career and volunteer until 1990 in Monmouth, Ore. He then went into private industry with the increasing use of Class A foam in the early '90s.

How did you get into foam?

I had the opportunity in 1986-89 to be a seasonal Bureau of Land Management firefighter. There were three people in the foam research group at district headquarters. We were tasked with determining what Class A foam could do for wildland agencies. We put hardware systems together ourselves and involved a lot of hardware and fire protection stuff as part of that three-person group.

Ron Rochna was the leader and primarily wildland, a fire management officer, which is like a fire chief, and had a lot of prescription burning and heavy fuels management in the wildland and he crossed over to the fire department side as a volunteer. I was complementary as I was more of a structure [firefighter] that crossed over to wildland, as our rural district was very big and had quite a bit of wildland.

Ron and I would concentrate on the tactical and application aspects depending on whose specialty it was, and I pretty much dreamed up the hardware and put it together to see if it would work.

Paul Schlobohm … came to the group with a different set of circumstances. He was a degreed forester. So you had two firemen — one structure and one wildland — and a forester. Paul was kind of our scientist.

Were you working for a company?

No, I was an instructor at the college and had from June until September off, a seasonal employee of BLM. We put research engines together with BLM vehicles by taking a BLM engine that was already in the fleet and making different foam conversions. In 1987 it was one system with one vehicle, and in 1988 it was a another system with a different vehicle.

In 1989, I was private with Odin Foam and we were creating our own systems, particularly CAFS. We were loosely affiliated with the BLM, so when we created even better and larger foam units, Rochna could lease those units from Odin when some research needed to be done. So Ron and I kept working together until I moved from Oregon in 1993.

How did CAF systems develop?

CAF systems developed by experiment. We just threw anything we knew about making bubbles away and tried different things. That was comical at times because the good ideas were really messy when they failed. We tried some cheap and dirty things with plastic pipe. When the pipe blew up with foam in it — you talk about people running! Yet when it worked, we validated that it worked.

The strange thing is that CAFS was around before the actual synthetic detergent foam showed up. The notion of pumping air into something that would foam was a lot earlier. Texas State Forestry actually had a [water-expansion pumping system] unit that's actually CAFS, but there was no Class A or wetting-agent foam. They were using anything cheap that would bubble. There was a paper mill waste … that would bubble up and make a foam, but it didn't wet very well. You'd stack this on the fuel and it did what we came to expect from CAFS.

Other guys were saying to use regular dish soap, and it's just doing way better…. It turns out that a good Class A foam at the chemical level does exactly what Dawn does. It has to be a good emulsifier, a good wetter and foam like hell. So Dawn was a Class A foam, we just didn't know it nor did we know when you're going to wet fuels in the wildland or structure, that letting it foam up was good.

When we did use wetting agents and you got some of the foam, we didn't like it, because … the bubbles seemed to be a nuisance. We didn't understand that the bubbles gave it a clinging ability and stability to stay in place long enough for the stuff to work.

That learning curve then came into play in 1987-88 when we would protect things with foam. For a long time, we knew if we put enough foam on a fire, it worked. We didn't know the mechanism. Obviously the bubbles were there and the fire wasn't. If it wasn't the foam that saved us, then what did?

When we did logging debris, the slash-burning, that was the name of the game. You foam from the line on out of what you were trying to hold. It's simply water management; water doesn't wet anything. What we know as Class A foam wets everything, and the more water you got down into the fuels, way down into the molecular cell structure — the porosity — the longer it takes for that to be reversed back out.

When people talk about foam and the urban interface, even in structures, Class A foam has the ability to put the room out and not come back. It's this nature of the foam that you've got water way down deep into your fuels, and it takes a lot of heat to get rid of that water before you can burn it again. If nothing else, it buys you time to come up with a Plan B.

Which area is more progressive, wildland or structure?

In the early days, wildland was much, much more progressive. They were probably 70-80% more progressive than structure. If you look at anybody's opinion of foam in 1985, … everybody hated using eductors because the darn things never worked when you wanted them to. Foam came in buckets so you had to carry it to any spot. You never put foam on anything but an oil fire, and fire departments didn't have that many oil fires.

Wildland never had any kind of foam, so whatever this Class A was, it was completely new and they looked right at it in their environment and were impressed. There was a huge upswing to where BLM and U.S. Forest Service and state forestry, several core areas, went into it with both feet.

Structure fire departments that only had building fires laughed at it up through maybe 1990 or later. Fire departments that had the urban interface and were right there in the woods were quite progressive in adopting for the urban interface fire, but not as an extinguishing agent in building fires.

When we switched and said it was making a difference in urban interface to the point where we were hardware-limited — the foam proportioners don't exist or the ones we had wouldn't shell out in wildland — we started playing with building fires. As soon as people saw the same results, where it made a difference in 1990, then a lot of people came on.

Structure is made up of a lot of layers and factions, so when small rural departments hard up for water saw this rapid knockdown foam, they were in first. Still, we have a lot of fire departments that have hydrants and say their water is free, so why do they have to spend money on it? Well, that's a truism, but we have a lot that say, “Let me get this straight: I don't have to work as hard with this stuff?”

The forest service in California got interested in parts and pieces. It happened in [California Department of Forestry,] also. A lot of the proportioners — Robwen, FoamPro — those were developed at the behest of wildland agencies.

One of the CDF fleet managers was Paul Blankenship, worked out of the Davis site, and was a consummate gearhead like myself. Paul knew a lot about farming too because Cal State — Davis had the [agriculture] group. A company called Hypro had some technologies where they could run an electric pump and inject a chemical-maybe a fertilizer and use a flow meter to speed up or slow the pump down. Paul talked to the Hypro field rep and explained the need to adapt it to foam. Hypro Corp. began a prototype, and the first FoamPro came out of that design criteria.

Ron and I were at the forefront of foam application. When FoamPro got the first unit close to working, we ended up with the prototype on the BLM unit just after the Yellowstone fire. It worked and would tell you the gpm and put foam in the water. While we were still developing the applications, companies would take a shot at trying to make it work.

Foam has gone from a curiosity to a pretty good thing to have. It's being used in enough areas that if a guy isn't using it, he can talk to people who are to find out it's pretty good stuff, and no, it doesn't cost that much…. When you see an automated, one-touch system, it means that Class A foam is a strategic and tactical standard for these guys. They're going to have a policy in this department that you run the foam, and if you decide it isn't working, then you turn it off. It's taken a long time. By 1990, I couldn't understand why everyone didn't get into it, but I was on the cutting edge, the lunatic fringe. It was scary to people, but it's really found it's place and is now a standard.…

What's going to be interesting to watch is one big city department that has five Pierce units on order with CAFS. We worked with them closely on specs, and they figured out that even with some detection systems, they were going to need more than plain old water down in those tunnels and … they had to jack up the extinguishing agents. They could drive with 500 gallons of water, and they can get more water, but they understood foam works better.…

The products today are such that you can develop foam-dependent strategies and tactics. Back in the wildland days, we were out on a limb. We would come up with a foam-dependent tactic and go over the hill with a 1H-inch line with foam. If the foam went away, we were in the middle of the fire and shouldn't have been — you needed twice as much water and the hose line wouldn't do it. CAFS was able to do four times over water.

As the reliability of the systems came up, you could make a decision like that and do it. The reliability is such today that you can make a conscious decision and make it work.

According to a number of departments, foam systems had maintenance issues.

Early proportioners — certain oneslumped in from early foam systems — were a holdover from Class B systems. Typical proportioning systems in the Class B era … needed to be fully washed or disassembled and cleaned out. With a lot of Class B foam, if the user didn't do that, then the mechanic is stuck taking it apart and cleaning it. The synthetic detergents that the Class A foams are made from really don't turn to gum or do anything near that.

Modern-day proportioners are designed to stay a foaming material. It makes the crew want to use it. When the foam doesn't sit static — the concentrate doesn't stay anywhere in the proportioning unit — then maintenance becomes check the screen on the intake side of the pump and see if any debris is there or if there are any calibration checks, do that annually.

Is foam affected by temperature?

Class A foams are to a low extent; they have a lot of solvents or a built-in anti-freeze. Even if they do have a minor separation, they get a white cloudy material that has a higher specific gravity at the bottom of the tank that comes up.

But I've run a Hypro in Gallup, N.M., at — 15° when the truck was left out all night, so I know the foam was pretty cold. It was stratified, cloudy, so we stirred it with a broom handle — it's still liquid — put water in the tank and turned it on and it still worked. It doesn't have near the below-temperature issues that some of the Class B foams have.

What about the environmental affects of foam?

That's the stickler. We don't like the fluorine, what we know as an AAAF foam, but yet that's all we have to do for big Bs. We'd like to see if you could take some of these … benign synthetic detergents [and] lessen their tendency to be an A, get them to cross into the B more….

Does a fire department need Class B?

They may not need to carry it on every engine in every place, because not every engine will run on the big one, but every department has to bear in mind what every hazard is and what scale they need to be able to deliver some Class B foam. It's not in every residential district.

Some claim A can be used on B fires.

It's very scary because we know there are guys out there who say they use Class A for everything and “it's not hurt nothing yet.” He's right, but what he's also [revealing are] the hazards of his protection level. What's going to happen when he has a large-scale B incident and he lays Class A on it?

If you have an A and a B, will they come out through the same mixer?

It's tough to see the difference. If there's a foam tank on there it's either going to pull from the A or the B tank. Unless you can tell by smell, it's all foam. There's a whole alcohol-resistant series of Class B foams that have some chemistry in them that makes them a little bit dangerous. If they get some contamination with alcohol or some other formulations with water, the material is a monomer and you'll get Jell-O in your tank. Guess what Class A has in it? Alcohol! If somebody inadvertently pours A in the B, it goops up the B tank right then and there.

People are struggling with onboard systems, on when to have B systems and how much. We do have people who thought it out and loaded with a Class B foam tank, [but] it runs the gamut. If there's a danger in this wholesale rush toward foam, it's gaining the technology and not really having a handle on the application.

What's the future for foam?

It's going to increase. It will continue to be more and more the norm. I'm not sure at this stage what you would do differently on the proportioning, they're pretty smart already, but proportioner development will continue.

CAFS, the compressed air side of things, will get more cost-effective; as we produce more units in volume we can control the cost. We're getting much better at building units, and we're reducing maintenance issues or configuring [units] so people aren't afraid of them. CAFS was quite scary and costly in the old days, and people decided not to do it. Now there's enough data out there that everyone can see the use of it.

There's some opportunity in CAFS units to automate the methodology whereby we make the CAF. The proportioner does an amazing job of putting the foam in the water for us, but the process of putting the water, the foam solution and the air together is a still a bit manual.… I would think as electric valve controls and some more automation begins to occur in plumbing systems on vehicles, we'll be able to automate some of the CAF mixing. On NFPA committees, we've dreamed of being able to push a button and CAF would come out the end of a line, and it's getting close to that. It's costly, but we're working on it.

There's a constant hunt on for the elusive universal foam concentrate. People already out there are purveying chemicals that are supposed to be a Class A and a Class B foam. The search is still on, but I don't really believe it can happen. Fundamentally, for a foam to be a good Class A it has to be a very active wetter and emulsifier in the presence of oils, greases and carbon-bearing materials. It'll get past the waxy follicle on the plant fuel; it goes right in and grips on charred rubber. It's absolutely fuel-attractive. That's the last thing you want Class B to do.

Your Class B is a liquid-carbon material. What happens with an A foam is that it's an emulsifier. If it does a great job of emulsifying, it's not a foam anymore, it's intermixed. Emulsions don't have that layer any more so they don't do vapor suppression. The only thing that keeps a flammable-liquid fire out is something over the top of the fuel to keep the vapor from emitting.

If you look at the data sheets of the current Class A foams from National and from Ansul, they talk about application on B incidents at the spill level, which is very shallow and the emulsification doesn't hurt anything. You have so much more foam than fuel. If you go up to a true fuel in depth, such as a tank, an emulsifier foam like a Class A will knock the fire down and pretty much put it out, but within seconds to minutes, all the bubbles are gone and re-ignition happens.

To be rated as a B foam under UL standards, you've got to put the fire out, stop applying and 15 minutes later you've got to conduct the burn-back test. Any of these universal foams are too much of an emulsifier and too fuel-attractive for that. There's still going to be a lot of activity with universal foams, but I don't think it's going to work.

Do you have a final message to the fire service?

Foam is not out in the lunatic fringe that much anymore. Our orbit has come in a lot closer to planet Earth. Use your prior fire experience, but talk to people who are pro-foam. Ask yourself if you'd have that same problem and would that run you up the wall or not. Go with a healthy skepticism. Strip away paradigms like “That's not how we do it” or “We're not used to that.” Water is pretty neat stuff, but it's not a perfect extinguishing medium, it just happens to be the only thing we had.

If chiefs could say, “This is how we're doing it now, but what if?” — imagine what could happen. People have looked at some of the things that Ron Rochna and I got into and said they'd have never taken that chance. Rochna and I are pretty goofy individuals and we never took a chance. Don't take a chance, but risk. If you don't take a risk, you're never going to be there.

It's leadership. People want to lead, but don't want to get hurt. Leading means going first. But somebody's go to do that. You've got to realize your fallibility. You've got to say, “I don't care if I fail three times, because I think I'll learn something.” A lot more people should just take that approach.