Palo Pinto County, TX -- I’m a member of the Santo Fire Department in Texas. We cover the southeast corner of Palo Pinto County, and Possum Kingdom (PK) is up in the northwest corner of the county. Our department was part of the response to the infamous PK Complex fires, made up of the combined Hohertz, Jackson Ranch, PK East, and PK West fires.
The morning of April 18th, when we had the big blow up, the TetraKO team had set up shop outside the incident command post. I had taken over command of the Possum Kingdom East portion of the fire the night before from Chief Ranft of the PK Fire Department. When Chief Ranft came back on duty at 8 a.m., he asked me to stay and work operations. When I was taking a break, I saw the TetraKO team mixing its product and getting set up, so I spoke with them.
They were batch mixing and loading TetraKO into vehicles for anyone in the command area that wanted it refilled into their tanks. What a lot of these firefighters started to use TetraKO for was structural protection and pretreatment. That’s what one of our engines ending up doing. I told our guys to go over and have our truck filled with TetraKO and to use it for structural protection, mop up and pretreatment.
We saved quite a number of structures, and TetraKO did a great job. The thing I found as the biggest benefit of TetraKO is that it holds the moisture longer and holds up better than Class A foam. TetraKO is thicker in the first place and holds on to the surface better than Class A. I watched them use it and I got feedback from the guys on the engine. They all spoke very highly about the TetraKO!
When you start talking about pretreatment and structure protection around buildings, and for other applications such as well sites, fence lines, or anything like that – I’d say it would work real good. After the PK fire, I didn’t hear anything negative from homeowners on washing TetraKO off their homes or vegetation.
TetraKO needs to be shown to some of the fire departments in our county. Many of us seek out mutual aid, we’re progressive, and we look for anything that can give us an advantage!
— Logan Loftin, Chief of Fire Operations
Santo Volunteer Fire and EMS Department