Annually, Colorado alone sees an average of 2,000 fires, and an average of 95,000

acres devoured by wildfires a year since 2000. Wild fires are beneficial and
necessary to our forests, however they can also be extremely dangerous and
destructive to humans and property.
In Colorado, we often experience droughts where wildfires run rampant and many
houses are endangered and destroyed. In 2012, the Weber fire burned 10,000 acres
of land outside of Mancos. 140 houses were evacuated, nearly 400 had preevacuation orders, some of which were only 20-30 minutes outside of Durango. In
2002, the Missionary Ridge fire struck even closer to home. Burning 71,739 acres,
this fire devastated our landscape and injured many.
As is often the case in technological advancements, these large-scale issues can have
an incredibly small solution. Nanotechnology advances the utilization of materials
and devices with extremely small dimensions. Nanotechnology materials are
substances designed or altered on the nanoscale (1nm to 100nm), which is the size
of large atoms or small molecules. When materials are taken down to the molecular
level, properties of materials can change dramatically, and they react in different
ways. This makes it easy to change their properties to improve the materials.
Many fields benefit from the use of nanotechnology materials such as biomedical
engineering and the use of nanotechnology for synthetic skin, computer engineering
by making computer chips smaller and lighter, but the one I found most fascinating
was civil engineering, and more specifically, fire-resistant or fire-repellent building
materials.
Nano-composites are nano-particles that have been added to other materials in bulk
to improve the overall properties. A nano-particle is a particle with at least one
dimension less than 200 nm. If we began to build houses with nano-composites
materials such as fire-retardant timber and fire-protective glass, houses in the range
of wildfires could be more easily protected. It would not be as easy to lose your
house and possessions if the right preventative actions were taken.
Nanotechnology makes wood more fire-retardant by adding a coating between the
wood and the fire. Fire proofing materials can work in many different ways, such as
resins, coatings, adding a hydrophobic layer, or impregnating foams and fibers into
the wood. This specific technology is not exactly new, and many products (wood and
plastic, etc.), are already incorporated into the fire-retardant system.
If the wood and metal in the structure of the house can be made fire resistant, the
only weak spots on the house are the windows. In solution to this, there is now firepreventive glass on the market. This is achieved through sandwiching a layer of
fused silica (SiO2) between two panels of glass. Silica is the dioxide form of silicon,
and is usually used in its powdered form. When heated, it becomes hard and opaque.
This is a fire-preventative shield, which all can agree is much more practical than
ordinary glass, which would break in a fire.

Silica is the only stable oxide of silicon, but instead of it being a silicon atom with
double bonds to two oxygen atoms, it is bonded with single bonds to four oxygen
atoms.
Although implementing these preventative measures will not necessarily prevent
fires, it does add an extra layer of safety to houses in the dry and very flammable
region of Colorado and the Four Corners. Fire fighters could then put less effort
towards spraying houses in the fires range and spend more of their time and
resources on controlling and putting out the fire. This would save many houses and
decrease the risk of losing your house and possessions to our annual wildfires.