Marco Terzin and his family were not at home when wind-driven flames raged through the Pacific palace. They soon learn that Inferno had destroyed the two-storey Spanish-style house that he had moved into just a month ago.
When Terrzzin followed the news of devastating losses, he felt helpless and was struck by accounts that many fire hydrants had lost pressure and were dry, causing firefighters to struggle to get water.
After that, the Italian-born engineer had an idea. I felt that the technology he invented along with his colleagues at the energy company certainly helped him. He thought the solution would ensure there was enough water on hand in the right place to lock up wildfires and keep the hydrant flowing.
“This problem has to be resolved,” Teldin said. “That’s resolved.”
The way, Teldine believes, is to reuse the low-cost water storage system that his company, Energy Vault, operates at a former coal mine in Sardinia, Italy. So the system is used to store intermittent energy by sending water uphill during the solar-powered daytime and running down the water at night.
Marco Terzin stands near a hillside burned down by the Palisade fire in Malibu. Telgin evacuated with his family from Pacific Pallisard, where the flames destroyed their homes. His company, Energy Vault, has developed an easy-to-deploy water storage system that, if strategically pre-located, would have helped combat fires in the LA area.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The water is stored in balloon-like inflatable tanks called water trees, standing 39 feet tall, resembling giant onion. Supported by steel poles and concrete foundations, each can hold about 148,000 gallons of water and weighs over 600 tons.
The company’s CEO and product officer Terruzzin said California installed these pop-up reservoirs in strategic locations to combat fire containment and battle that was the kind of devastation that devastated the Pacific Ocean Pallisad and Altadena last month. We believe we need to provide additional supply.
The patented system is not yet used for firefighting, but Terzin and his company plan to quickly ship two prototypes from their Texas facilities, allowing them to be demonstrated at California fire agencies .
Terdin assumes that some water trees are located near fire hydrants, and that the neighbors are placed in rows where they meet fields, spraying water to extinguish the flames and extinguish the floating meckers. creates a kind of “shield” that functions as a fire.
Once an inflatable tank is installed in a high fire risk area, it is pumped from existing local government systems and stored water is separated from drinking water and stored in an emergency.
In the event of a fire, the water will run down from the tank due to gravity. It would create strong flow enough to maintain pressure on nearby fire hydrants for hours, Terrzzin said.
Lined between the house and the flammable vegetation, the tanks are equipped with a network of flexible pipes and sprinklers, raising a large area to prevent the flames from progressing.
“Ideal,” Telgin said. “It can be implemented today.”
He estimates that if more than 4,000 water trees were installed throughout the Los Angeles area, each cost around $80,000.
Terruzzin said a single water tree can hold enough water to release about 800 gallons per minute for three hours. With the neighborhood rebuilt, installing 40 or 50 of them in Palisades in the Pacific Ocean will help make the community safer, he said.
Dean Flores, a member of the California Air Resources Committee and former state senator, learned about ideas from his friend Telgin, and the concept “progressive innovation that allows us to change the game in the way we approach it.” I said I liked it. Preparing for a wildfire.”
Los Angeles and other fire-prone regions need a decentralized water storage strategy to address the repeated issues of fire hydrants that lose pressure and power loss during fires, Flores said. I said that. He said the restrictions on existing infrastructure calls for rethinking how water is stored to better protect communities.
“It seems like one of those ideas that could have been a game-changer already. If we started thinking earlier,” says Florez. “Did it prevent all the destruction? Maybe not. But did it erase more time, delay the spread, reduce losses? Absolutely.”
This concept is one of many concepts that local and state officials consider when analyzing how to remake water systems in LA and other regions, and how to analyze equipment suitable for large-scale wildfires. It may be.
The January fire revealed major restrictions on Southern California’s urban water system. Experts say they don’t design the ability to infuriate big wildfires throughout the neighborhood. When the system lost pressure in parts of the Pacific Palisade, some fire hydrants drier in the high release area, hampering firefighting efforts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the loss of pressure and water shortages from the Pacific Palace reservoir, not commissioned for repairs. The LA City Council has also ordered the city’s Water and Power Department to present its findings on why firefighters ran out of water.
Terruzzin said he was confused as to why officials empty the 117 million gallon reservoir for nearly a year for repairs. That being said, he believes that filling the reservoir did not completely solve the problem. He said the current system of pipes does not allow all the water needed from the reservoir to be shunted at once, as limited flow capacity presents a “huge bottleneck.” I did. The place you need to go.
“We need distributed water resources,” says Terrzzin. “You are being distributed strategically to protect your residential areas. You have to have water nearby.”
Installing water surfaces in LA could help solve this problem, he said. Valves operating on remote control systems can be quickly opened to pop-up tanks and can send water to the pipes and “check that there is high pressure in the system” whenever a fire is in demand Masu. And he said the eruption spray from the hillside tanks was flooded with the landscape to keep the flames at bay.
Terruzzin has been working on energy storage projects that reduce carbon emissions to address climate change for many years. The energy storage project with water trees began to work in Italy last year.
Workers in Sardinia, Italy inspect one of the plastic membranes in the reservoir. The Energy Vault says it is designed to last at least 20 years.
(Commentary of Energy Vault)
The company has begun studying the possibility of using inflatable tanks in firefighting after the fatal wildfires of 2023 in Greece. However, Telgin said it was only after the Palisades that he and his colleagues had realized that they had to connect the dots and implement this solution.
The water tree that the company plans to produce in the US will hold water in a 4.8 mm thick plastic membrane designed to withstand fire and last more than 20 years. Terruzzin said the 35-foot-wide reservoir is designed in the form of water droplets, making it the perfect shape when gravity pulls down the enormous contents.
Water experts who provided information about the concept also raised several questions, but said they appear to be promising.
Sanjay Mohanty, Associate Professor of Engineering at UCLA, said: “Investing in these systems is beneficial.”
Mohanty said he is seeing several challenges, including complying with drinking water regulations and showing that the system is safe in earthquakes. (Terruzzin said the system is being tested to withstand earthquakes.)
“They also need to demonstrate that the amount of water they need actually makes the difference they plan,” Mohanty said. “There are a lot of calculations to go to, but you need a reservoir. It’s definitely a very promising technique to put it in a place that doesn’t have a big reservoir.”
Upmanu Lall, director of the Arizona State University Water Research Institute at Julie Anne Wrigley Global Futures Institute, questioned whether tanks would effectively reduce fire losses.
“It depends on the scale of the deployment because if you can’t increase the density of your deployment, you really don’t reduce the loss too much,” Lall said. He also said it is particularly important to strategically choose where the tank will be installed.
Another challenge, Lall said, is to convince homeowners to allow large onion reservoirs for their neighborhoods and natural landscapes.
“How socially acceptable is it for these highly wealthy individuals to have these balloons sit behind them?” Lal said. “Of course you need to get a general buy-in.”
Terruzzin agreed that “some work needs to be done” to make the big white drop “aesthetically acceptable.” But as he sees it, the balloon chunks can be like a highway: functional and necessary.
“Without new infrastructure that will allow California to access water in the right place at the right time, these wildfire issues will not be resolved and will become more and more frequent,” Teldin said.
The cost of investing in this type of solution is small compared to risk, he said.
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