Why Fire Blankets Are Needed Now to Protect Our Homes!

Market Analysis
According to the California Fire Census, more than 390 of about 1000 separate fire districts currently have a wildland/urban interface problem. Since there are an average of 2.465 people per household in the U.S. (2000) and over 34,000,000 people in California, that means that 5,379,000 homes in California would be candidates for Fire Blankets; unless you made an assumption that only 10% of a district's people are near enough to the interface to be at all threatened—in which case we're dealing with 537,900 homes that are a potential target market for Fire Blankets.

Florida has over 16,000,000 people and if you use similar processes to figure out the market in that state, you get 2,531,000 homes or 253,100 homes at the 10% rate.

If only 1% of the rest of the U.S. population lives near wildland/urban interface areas, then that's 1% of 286,000,000 (minus the 50 million in California and Florida = 236,000,000) people, or 2,360,000 people, which have 768,000 homes to choose to Fire Blanket if the marketing is effective.

So there are, by these estimates, 1,748,000 houses to target-market. If 10% of them eventually buy at an average $10,000 cost, that's gross income of $1,748,000,000. And if millions more buy eventually because of fear of nearby structure fires, rioters, earthquake-caused fires (Northridge, California was an extremely expensive disaster), and/or terrorists, the sky's the limit. And that's just the U.S. market. There are other wildland/urban interface areas in the world, all of whose people like the idea of being safe and secure just as much as U.S. people do.

Materials Considerations
In his recent book, Bold New World, William Knoke describes an abundance of research and success in developing new cost-effective "raw" materials. He believes that new "raw materials" in the next twenty years will completely revolutionize manufacturing and construction by making products more functional at less cost. He describes how with supercomputers, scientists (he calls them "materialogists") are able to play with atomic components of materials to create new substances by design (rather than by trial and error, as in the past). From construction materials that are cheaper and stronger, yet lighter, more durable, easier to build with and more resistant to earthquakes, to ceramics that can withstand up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, to fabrics like Spectra and Kevlar, Gore-Tex, Dacron, Lycra, Ultrasuede, et al., he predicts a thousandfold increase in these developments over the next few decades. I have no doubt that if the perfect Fire Blanket material doesn't exist now, it can be developed.

Bibliography

Baptiste, Linda. Firescape; Landscaping to Prevent Fire Hazard. Oakland, CA: East Bay Municipal Utility District, 1992.

Blair, William K. Fire!: Survival and Prevention. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983.

Buckley, John. Hotshot. Boulder, CO: Pruett Pub. Co., 1990.

Dunn, Vincent. The Dangers of Brush Fires. Firehouse; February 1996.

Dychtwald, Ken. The Age Wave. New York: Bantam, 1990.

Famighetti, Robert. The World Almanac. Mahwah, New Jersey: Funk & Wagnalls Corp., 1994.

Knoke, William. Bold New World. The Essential Road Map to the Twenty-first Century. New York, Tokyo, London: Kodansha International, 1996.

Popcorn, Faith. The Popcorn Report. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Weise, David R. and Martin, Robert E. The Biswell Symposium: Fire Issues and Solutions in Urban Interface and Wildland Ecosystems. Walnut Creek, CA: Pacific Southwest Research Station, 1994

Also, many issues of magazines such as Wildfire (the quarterly bulletin of the International Association of Wildland Fire), The International Journal of Wildland Fire, and other issues of Firehouse.