Firefighting foams became prevalent in the 1960’s and have gone through many improvements over the years. Every firefighter is familiar with foam and the techniques necessary to fight fires.
Foam creates a blanket, separating the fuel from the oxygen, smothering the fire. Companies designed foams that could withstand high heat and foams that were more viscous so the foam blanket wouldn’t fail before the fuel had a chance to cool down below the autoignition temperature. Foams were created that were resistant to alcohols. Then, in 2002, companies realized the foams they were using contained toxic fluorine and had bioaccumulative characteristics.
In the United States and Australia, it was legal to use existing stocks of fluorine foams. In Canada, fluorine foams could not be used after May, 2013 and in Europe they had to be incinerated. There was a great shift to replace these foams with fluorine-free foams. On September 11, 2010, 40 delegates from around the world met in Adelaide, Australia to discuss firefighting foams. One conclusion was today’s foams last 30% as long as the old PFOS foams and require three times the amount of concentrate and produce three times the amount of run-off. The delegates also noted the “environmentally friendly” fluorine-free foams are generally categorized as R51/53, which is toxic to aquatic life with long-term effects to the aquatic environment.
