Gel Used in Diapers Is a Fire Retardant

Monday, June 23rd, 2003

Gel Used in Diapers Is a Fire Retardant:

Judith Withers watched in horror from the desert floor as a raging wildfire consumed the mountainside outside San Diego where her home stood. “It looked like an atomic bomb blast up there,” she recalls of that day last summer.

She returned to the charred landscape a few days later and was shocked to find her house standing and unscathed. “It looked like God picked up my house, and the fire blew by, and then he put it back down,” she says.

It wasn’t divine force that saved her house. It was a man-made gel, one of a family of superabsorbent plastics known as polyacrylates, which are probably best known for the vital role they play in disposable diapers.

Inside a dry diaper, the material is fibrous and grainy; it becomes a thick goo when wet. Unknown to Ms. Withers, firefighters had slathered her house with a premixed version of the superabsorbent gel, like a giant wet blanket, in a test of its fire-fighting potential.

There does appear to be a downside though:

With some brands of the gel, cleanup is a major headache. Sprayed over an entire house — windows, walls, porches, roof — the gel is slimy at first. Eventually, it dries to a nearly invisible film. Add water — such as rain — and the stuff comes back to life, oozing out over porches and driveways and sliming the house all over again. It takes weeks or months to wear off.

When fire rampaged through their neighborhood outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., George and Barbara Erb were among the first to have their house gelled in a test two years ago. Their 2,800-square-foot log house survived, and insurance paid to have the gel power-washed off.

But then it rained. “This white gooey stuff started coming out between the logs,” Mr. Erb recalls. Powerwashing ruined his roof, which the insurance company replaced. He had to have the log exterior refinished. Still, the long cleanup beat having to rebuild a burned-down house.

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