Class A foams were first used by firefighters starting in the mid-1980s, and firefighters kept these foams in their toolkit and used them to battle fires for years. More recently, its use has declined, and Class A Foam is rarely considered as a resource by today’s firefighters, despite its advantages.

Advantages of Class A Foam

The key benefit of Class A Foam is that it significantly enhances water’s effectiveness in dousing flames. Water’s strong surface tension causes it to bead up and roll off most fuels and away from heat too quickly to be able to absorb its full heat capacity. Foam is made with hydrocarbon surfactants, and its addition to water reduces its surface tension.

When you add a small amount of foam to water, at concentration levels between 0.1 to 1.0%:

• Water droplets are stretched out into a bubble, increasing its heat absorbing surface.
• The water penetrates deep into Class A fuels (paper, wood, cloth, and some plastics) to stop flames.

By increasing water’s effectiveness, foam allows firefighters to accomplish a lot more using much less water—in fact it can increase water efficiency 2-4x. Class A foam also allows firefighters to create a foam blanket by separating fuel from the air, which allows water draining from the bubbles to provide continual cooling. Use of foam also makes it easier to preserve the scene for arson investigation, increases firefighter safety with shortened knockdown time, reduces the amount of toxins released in the air through combustion, and reduces the chances of a fire rekindling.

Declining interest in Class A Foam

Despite the aforementioned benefits, use of Class A foam has declined, partially due to misperceptions about its environmental impact, but it is biodegradable, non-toxic, and the United States Forest Service (USFS) has tested it for toxicity and has approved it for wildland firefighting, so it is proven to be safe to use. 

Another reason cited for the decline in use of Class A foam is a lack of knowledge among today’s firefighters. When Class A foam was first introduced, fire stations intensively trained their teams on how to use it to ensure every firefighter knew when and how to use foam. That isn’t happening now, and if today’s firefighters aren’t being trained, they simply will not use it.

Firefighters also look at water as "free,” so adding an agent is considered an additional expense. However, the concentration with water to create the optimum mixture is so minimal that fire departments and other agencies need to spend literally pennies per gallon to use it. That is a very low investment, when you consider that it is being used to save people’s lives, homes, and property.


Making the Case for Class A Foam

There are multiple advantages of using Class A Foam, as indicated above, but the two most important things it does are improve firefighter safety and boost water’s effectiveness to reduce the amount of time it takes to extinguish a fire. Those two factors alone should be reason enough for more fire stations to use Class A foam to battle fires.

For that to happen, fire stations and others in our industry have to be more proactive in training today’s firefighters on the use of Class A foam. We also need to address the misunderstandings about the composition of Class A foam, so that those inside and outside the industry know that it is not toxic and that it presents minimal risk to the environment.

Perimeter Solutions offers a free training course to fire departments around the country on how to properly use firefighting foam. Departments interested in learning more can contact Norbe Puroll, Business Development, Government & Municipal, at norbe.puroll@perimeter-solutions.com.




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