"Class A" Foam

The other night I was sent to another station to pick up the brush truck to go to a dump fire. It was maybe an acre(?) of logs, tree stumps, fallen trees, discarded Christmas trees, and the like. Our job was to contain it. We did, with the help of a couple dozers. We knocked down the edges of the fire and they dozed a line around it. Then we let it burn out on its own.

Our brush trucks have a Class A Foam system on them, which worked pretty slick! I was quite impressed! We were using it on our truck (my partner and I) and the other brush truck wasn't. The trucks are identical, both have 210 gallon water tanks with built in foam cells and there is a proportioner built in to the water pump, so you can dial in the percentage you want. On our CAFS pumpers we use 0.3%, so that is what I dialed it to.

It worked like a charm! Our tank lasted almost 2.5x longer than the other brush truck! (Remember, they were using plain water, not the foam mixture.) When we put out a fire in our sector, it went out faster than I am accustomed to (remember, I'm new when it comes to Class A Foam) and here's the cool part - it stayed out! We only had one flare up in our sector, and that was because we initially didn't realize it was seated five feet deep in that particular pile.