FireBusters: Desalination Plants
"Why don't you guys just desalinate water to fight fire?" Here's the answer!
Introducting FireBusters, a new thing here where I take common “urban myths” and “why don’t you guys just…” topics about wildland fire management issues, bust the myths, and explain how things really work.
I’m your host, Mark Howell, and my qualifications for doing this are legion: all coming back to having been in wildland fire for 20 years now, starting with a county fire department, moving to the US Forest Service in Fire Management (and across the country doing it!), then setting out on my own here! Over the last two decades, I’ve worked in every sub-field of Wildland Fire Management that doesn’t involve jumping out of a perfectly good airplane or helicopter, or driving heavy equipment (but I HAVE told the bulldozer where to go and what to push over).
I’ve spent a lot of extra time, training, and experience in the sub-fields of Prevention/Mitigation, Fire Planning, Fuels Management (planning and running thinning and prescribed fire projects) and Incident/Emergency Management as a Planning Section Chief.
Today’s “episode” is spurred by an article I wrote for Domestic Preparedness Journal, which resulted in a question in my inbox about the use of desalination plants to provide water for fire suppression and structure protection.
“Why don’t you guys… just use desalination plants for more water?”
Firstly, I’m originally from California. Few Americans know more about persistent extreme drought than a Californian, especially a Central Californian who grew up where fields that help feed the nation went fallow, parched ground cracked like thirsty lips, and the famous "grapes of wrath” looked more like anemic blueberries. Towns ran out of water, reservoirs ran dry, even the ground sank in places from groundwater depletion. Drought isn’t a new thing for California; I remember being on “watering restrictions” as a teenager in the 90s. It just all came to a big, ugly head in the mid-twenty-teens before I moved out to the - ironically snowier and wetter - “high desert mountains” of John Day, Oregon at the beginning of 2016.
Deep in the water crisis (caution: LONG - but thoroughly informative - READ!), around 2015, California looked to the oceans as well.
Problem the First: Budgets and Costs
Money makes the world move, right? Not physics, nay, money is the Grand Unified Force that moves all on planet Earth. According to this article, the costs for a desalination plant run from $300,000,000USD to over $1,000,000,000USD. Yep, all those zeroes are there for deliberate impact, count em up. Even Silicon Valley tech bros will grimace at those price tags. California has been operating “in the red” for as far back as I can remember, despite having the GDP of a small developed nation, and many municipalities struggled to balance their budgets at the end of the year. Coughing up over a quarter to a full billion was and is a big, BIG ask for any reason.
Even doing the required project proposals, scoping, and analysis to set the stage for such an endeavor as a desalination plan requires a start-up cost: environmental scientists and engineers to conduct surveys and studies, writers and editors to help prepare their reports… you get where I’m going here and it isn’t Cheapsville.
Problem the Second: Environmental Impacts and Timeliness
At least here in America, when you want to do anything that has a potential significant environmental/ecological impact, and desalination plants are alleged to have some pretty noticeable ones, you got a lot of ‘splaining to do, Lucy. Whether you fall under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), or something like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA - it’s a similar process but for state/local gov entities vs NEPA being for federal agencies/lands), there is a big, long process of project scoping, studies, reviews, comments, objections, and oh yeah, everybody’s favorite part: litigation. I’m pretty surprised this project didn’t get litigated into the ground by a coalition of eco-activist organizations.
The Doheny Ocean Desalination Project in Dana Point, California was likely scoped around 2017, with an Environmental Impact Report (the CEQA version of a Federal EIS, this one is 1,710 pages long) completed and submitted in 2019, to receive project approval in late 2022.
According to their own timeline, the plant should be fully operational by 2029. Should. Ten full years after the completion of the EIS/EIR, and seven years after project approval, it’s not exactly a “timely” solution to our issue, is it?
Ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars later we have more water! Awesome! but still…
Problem the Third: How Do We Move the Water?
Time to get in the weeds, folks: now we get into the strategies and tactics of wildland fire and particularly structure preparation or “hardening”, and defense.
Desalination plants require electricity, and while the technology continues to improve in energy efficiency, the simple fact is that often large swaths of areas are shut down in and near high-risk areas during high fire danger days, called a Public Safety Power Shutoff or PSPS.
While major pumping stations are critical infrastructure and typically have their own backup power supply, those can and occasionally do fail, usually when you need them most! Murphy’s Law hits frequently, and hard, in the public safety realm.
Any water delivery operation has a few critical pieces, going back to basic S-211 Pumps/Water Handling stuff here, but for those who haven’t had the benefit of that class, you need:
Water Supply
Pumps
Hoses
Appliances (adaptors, reducer/increasers, wyes, nozzle/sprinkler heads)
Each of those introduces a “potential point of failure”. A failure of “supply” was blamed for the Palisades Fire’s rapid unchecked growth, alleging “insufficient water to combat the wind-swept flames”, never mind that NO amount of water is sufficient to combat a veg fire in dormant and cured chaparral pushed by Foehn (“Santa Ana”) winds that grounded aerial firefighting resources.
Even if you have a supply, say water tenders (think the big water trucks you see at construction sites, but often with better pumps), you still have to worry about pumping the water through hoses to sprinkler and nozzle systems.
Pumps require either electricity or gas (and water tenders require diesel); ultimately, once the electricity goes out, whether via deliberate shutdown or infrastructure damage and partial grid failure, the local gas and diesel get cut off as well. Pumps also require maintenance, Mark IIIs (the most common wildfire pump) are notoriously finicky, require a different 2-stroke mix from chainsaws, and while they can deliver some great pressure, they’re somewhat anemic with the Gallons Per Minute (GPM) delivery. Even the improved “Mark-3 Watson”, while lighter, smaller, and capable of 380PSI, still only delivers a maximum of 100GPM, where a 4-sprinkler setup for corner coverage of a residence would require ~120GPM of flow.
Multiply that setup by number of homes in a subdivision, and this gets real unsustainable and unrealistic real fast.
Ok Mr. Problems, What’s the Solution?
The best solution doesn’t require water, ANY water, from any source!
No desalination plants.
No sprinkler setups.
No fire engines parked in the driveway.
All it takes is some work from the homeowner and neighbors. Time to get your paws dirty, invest a little sweat equity and a few bucks at your choice of building supply store, and apply a little elbow grease; alternately, pay a contractor to “make it go away”. However you get there, the goal here is to harden your home against wildfire.
Seal the little gaps in siding and roofing where embers can get in.
Screen exterior vents or install ones that can be closed.
Find every little nook and cranny where an ember might possibly blow in and hang out, slowly smoldering itself into a fire, and CLOSE THAT GAP.
Live in a subdivision? Great, get everyone together to help each other, lighten the load (“many hands make light work” applies here), and consider building a FireWise Community.
Got other ideas or suggestions? Drop them in the comments!
One last note…
I am splitting my Substack into two. Going forward, prescribed fire content can be found at Prescribed Firelighter, which will focus 100% on prescribed fire information, best practices, and lessons learned content.
Grounded Truths will remain a more general wildland fire, leadership, and emergency management/public safety-oriented stack.
Feel free to follow both, or pick the one that better suits your needs and desires. The last thing I want to do is clog someone’s inbox with irrelevant or uninteresting content.