Jacob Schuler is not a firefighter. But in 2021 he heard from a friend who was first on scene to a barn in flames in Stevens County, Wash. The friend described the technique firefighters use to slow or contain a brush fire when there is no access to water.
“Standard operating procedure is to grab shovels and start digging a fire line,” Schuler told GeekWire. “It removes the vegetation, and when the fire gets there it’s supposed to put out the fire because it runs out of fuel.”
That day flames were too fast for the diggers and the blaze raced into a neighboring field and off it went, Schuler said. The 30-day Ford-Corkscrew Fire burned 16,000 acres and 18 homes were lost.
“Hearing that story, that when the water is gone they grab shovels — that was a problem statement for me,” Schuler said, and he set out to find a solution.
Spokane-based Blaze Barrier was born out of Schuler’s desire to give firefighters and homeowners a quick-acting tool to fight wildfires. The technology works by connecting a series of modules which contain monoammonium phosphate, a non-toxic extinguishing powder. When fire reaches the line’s fuses, the modules ignite and knock down the flames while also creating a fire-suppressing barrier to stop the fire’s progress.
“It’s like a fire line in a box instead of the manual labor of digging the vegetation away,” Schuler said. The line is fast and easy to deploy from its storage box, the powder is biodegradable, and unused lines or modules can be picked up and reused.
Blaze Barrier is appropriate for certain types of wildfires and grass fires. It’s not intended to work against a massive blaze fed by powerful winds, like those that overpower firetrucks or jump between tree tops.
“We hear pretty consistently from firefighters, that giving them an extra 5-10 minutes or slowing the intensity of a fire is game-changing for them,” Schuler said. “It allows them to get into better position so they’re not being overtaken.”
Blaze Barrier recently closed a $760,000 seed funding round, with Avista Development and Barton Ventures co-leading the round and participation from 12 angel investors. The company previously raised a seed round of $300,000, and a Kickstarter campaign raised about $53,000.
The startup employs six people and is actively hiring for a 9,500-square-foot production facility where it hopes to eventually assemble 1,000 fire lines a day.
A 25-foot Blaze Barrier sells on the company’s website for $295. A patent is pending for the system Schuler created in which the modules are strung together. And the company just got sign-off from the U.S. Department of Transportation to ship via common carrier.
The video below, showing a previous iteration of Blaze Barrier, illustrates how the system is deployed and ignites:
