Maine Forest Rangers Find A Use For Leaf Blowers To Fight Fires

I certainly know nothing about fighting fires. When I was a kid, I seemed to know a lot more about starting them. I once nearly burned down my elementary school principal's house after setting his back woods on fire, while out playing with matches with my friends. I would've been a legend at school, but certainly not at home!

But these days, while kids playing with matches certainly accounts for a certain amount of fires out there, more often than not, wildfires start as a brush or yard debris fire that got out of control. And as those fires spread farther away from civilization and more towards the woods, it gets much harder to fight them.

So what do you do? You need to get water to where the fire is, right? Maine Forest Rangers have come up with a pretty ingenious device that I was checking out on their Facebook page. They've taken a 5 gallon back pump, and attached it to a regular old leaf blower. The result is a "powered" back pump that they can use to spread water more quickly and effectively.

Don't take my word for it, check out the video:

In the video, you can see that it enables the ranger to walk around the fire on all sides, and quickly put out the small fire. It's one of those things that they either just full-on invented, or the real thing is so expensive that they decided to rig up their own version of it to save ungodly amounts of money. Either way, it's sheer genius.

It makes me want to see what other things you could hook up to a leaf blower that you could make easier...Could you make a homemade power washer? Could you hook two leaf blowers together and make a mega-leaf blower? The possibilities seem endless, if not outright stupid. But this auto-pump deal is unreal.

But really, let's all do our part to make it so they never have to use these things in the first place. Always get a burn permit, burn responsibly, or just don't burn at all if conditions don't seem right. If there were only some kind of spokes-bear to tell us that only we could prevent forest. Someone should invent that, too.