The 2003 Cedar Fire destroyed 2800+ structures and caused over $1.3 billion in damages within San Diego County, CA. There were swimming pools all throughout this fires path of destruction. See the Google Satellite image below.
This shows the destruction caused in the community of Scripps Ranch. The red markers show where 275+ homes were destroyed while the blue markers show where over 290 pools sat full. That’s over 5 million gallons spread throughout these areas of destruction.
Now let’s take a look at the zoomed in portion of this destruction.
The red arrow shows where this fire traveled along Pomerado Road fueled by Eucalyptus trees and wood shake shingle roofs. Over 60 homes were destroyed along this path. The fire likely could’ve been stopped before reaching these homes. See the Google Satellite image below.
This shows 2 lines of 4 monitor placement PTU’s deployed along Pomerado Road. These walls of water would’ve combined to produce over 12,000 gallons per minute with sizeable overlap. This fire likely could’ve been stopped before reaching most of these homes.
Now let’s take a look at the southeastern portion of Scripps Ranch. See the google satellite image below.
The red markers show where over 100 homes were destroyed. As you can see from the blue markers, this neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of house swimming pools. Instead this neighborhood has access to a large cummunity pool which is shown by the green marker. This pool holds around 10 times the water as a typical house pool and is within range for all these homes. See the Google Satellite image below to see what could’ve been possible.
The overlapped blue circles represent the outputs of just 10 monitor placement systems deployed from this community pool and a few of the house pools. At full operation they would produce a whopping 16,000 gallons per minute with sizeable overlap. These and most of the homes in Scripps Ranch likely could’ve been saved. Firefighters could’ve made it rain all over.