Best House?
Apr. 16th, 2009 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerThis was one of the odd shows that we seem to be getting here in Japan during the break in seasons. A three-hour special with the title Best House. It seemed to be just random best things from around the world. Most of them were just kind of strange, but the best new firefighting tools and the segment with a samurai doing sword tricks were interesting. For some reason it reminded me of the Idea Shop that so many Japanese department and grocery stores have where you can find odd new products.
The three best new firefighting tools included what I would call a water bazooka, a foam truck, and something called SAT119.
The water bazooka was a man-portable backback holding water and compressed air, with hoses leading to a short bazooka style gadget. A pipe with handholds, which they held at their hip, rather than shoulder-mounted. The trick here is that it fills most of the pipe with water -- imagine a four-inch pipe with about a yard of water -- and fills a chamber behind that with high-pressure air. Then when you trigger it, that charge of water gets blasted out, somewhat like a shotgun blast of liquid. They showed firefighters using this gadget to blast their way through a room, splatting the fires out. Apparently much more effective than simple hoses, partly because of the focused direction, and partly because of the high-pressure blast delivering the droplets.
Foam trucks? This seems to be the fire department version of the airport standard foam sprayer. They actually held a contest between a water truck and a foam truck. A gasoline bath with a mountain of rubber tires was set on fire and a professional fireman set to work to put it out. 30 seconds for the foam, three minutes for the water. Apparently there are some 300 of these foam trucks in fire departments across Japan. I actually suspect it may depend a little bit on what kind of fire, but they certainly seem effective for the right kind of fire.
Can you imagine a hand grenade that puts out flames? SAT119 comes in a specially designed plastic bottle, about the size of a one liter water or soda bottle. The difference is that this bottle is designed to break and disperse the fluid inside when it strikes. As little as a 30 cm. drop (about a foot) will make it break. And the chemical inside immediately goes into action, turning into gas and smothering flames in the area. They showed a single bottle being tossed into a small room, maybe 8 by 10, filled with flames -- and 5 seconds later, all the flames were out. They say that the gas is not toxic to humans -- so one of the use scenarios is that a fireman tosses one bottle to clear part of the room, tosses another near a victim, and then runs and picks up the victim and pulls them out. The kicker on this one apparently is price -- one bottle runs about $60! They were suggesting that fire departments may need to get special funding, but as a lifesaving tool, this is apparently one that firemen like.
The samurai is a young man who is considered a master of the sword. In this segment, they challenged him to do several legendary feats. First, cutting the flame off a candle. Indeed, the slow-motion camera showed that he cut the burning wick of the candle, and the flame hovered above the sword for a moment. Second, peeling a spear of asparagus laying on a practice stand. Here he sliced a very thin layer off the asparagus with one flick of the sword. Across the bottom of the asparagus, rather than the top. Third was to cut an arrow in flight. The archer was shooting headless arrows into a target beside the swordsman. However, the sword was in the scabbard! And the archer shot, the swordsman drew and cut upward, and the arrow fell -- in two pieces, the fletching cut from the body. The final feat was perhaps the simplest. The practice pole is wrapped bamboo. The trick here is to not just cut it in two, but rather to cut it twice. Here we saw the swordsman cut upward across the lower part, then cut back across the upper part before it had time to fall.
And that was what I noticed in Best House. Firefighting and sword tricks.
The three best new firefighting tools included what I would call a water bazooka, a foam truck, and something called SAT119.
The water bazooka was a man-portable backback holding water and compressed air, with hoses leading to a short bazooka style gadget. A pipe with handholds, which they held at their hip, rather than shoulder-mounted. The trick here is that it fills most of the pipe with water -- imagine a four-inch pipe with about a yard of water -- and fills a chamber behind that with high-pressure air. Then when you trigger it, that charge of water gets blasted out, somewhat like a shotgun blast of liquid. They showed firefighters using this gadget to blast their way through a room, splatting the fires out. Apparently much more effective than simple hoses, partly because of the focused direction, and partly because of the high-pressure blast delivering the droplets.
Foam trucks? This seems to be the fire department version of the airport standard foam sprayer. They actually held a contest between a water truck and a foam truck. A gasoline bath with a mountain of rubber tires was set on fire and a professional fireman set to work to put it out. 30 seconds for the foam, three minutes for the water. Apparently there are some 300 of these foam trucks in fire departments across Japan. I actually suspect it may depend a little bit on what kind of fire, but they certainly seem effective for the right kind of fire.
Can you imagine a hand grenade that puts out flames? SAT119 comes in a specially designed plastic bottle, about the size of a one liter water or soda bottle. The difference is that this bottle is designed to break and disperse the fluid inside when it strikes. As little as a 30 cm. drop (about a foot) will make it break. And the chemical inside immediately goes into action, turning into gas and smothering flames in the area. They showed a single bottle being tossed into a small room, maybe 8 by 10, filled with flames -- and 5 seconds later, all the flames were out. They say that the gas is not toxic to humans -- so one of the use scenarios is that a fireman tosses one bottle to clear part of the room, tosses another near a victim, and then runs and picks up the victim and pulls them out. The kicker on this one apparently is price -- one bottle runs about $60! They were suggesting that fire departments may need to get special funding, but as a lifesaving tool, this is apparently one that firemen like.
The samurai is a young man who is considered a master of the sword. In this segment, they challenged him to do several legendary feats. First, cutting the flame off a candle. Indeed, the slow-motion camera showed that he cut the burning wick of the candle, and the flame hovered above the sword for a moment. Second, peeling a spear of asparagus laying on a practice stand. Here he sliced a very thin layer off the asparagus with one flick of the sword. Across the bottom of the asparagus, rather than the top. Third was to cut an arrow in flight. The archer was shooting headless arrows into a target beside the swordsman. However, the sword was in the scabbard! And the archer shot, the swordsman drew and cut upward, and the arrow fell -- in two pieces, the fletching cut from the body. The final feat was perhaps the simplest. The practice pole is wrapped bamboo. The trick here is to not just cut it in two, but rather to cut it twice. Here we saw the swordsman cut upward across the lower part, then cut back across the upper part before it had time to fall.
And that was what I noticed in Best House. Firefighting and sword tricks.
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Date: 2009-04-20 09:19 pm (UTC)As for the firemen tricks up their sleeves, I obviously won't care if my house is burning down save for extinguishing the fire. But the first thought I had in my mind was, what types of chemicals are they using now? Will the chemicals in the foam, for instance, damage the furnishing far more than fire would?
The SAT119 sounds pretty cool though. Sorta like paintball grenades, but with water.