Engineers hope to fight wildfires by dropping huge water balloons
This story ran on AP’s national wire, the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune, the home pages of Yahoo! News and AOL, with video that I shot and edited.
Click to play AP Video: Firefighting water balloons
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) _ William Cleary believes aerial firefighting could become child’s play.
Five years ago, his son drenched him with a water balloon – and got him to thinking.
“He was three stories up and I was walking, and he still managed to hit me square in the head,” said Cleary, a Boeing engineer. “I thought, why can’t we be this accurate with water on fires?”
So he started working on a system to use giant water balloons to put out wildfires.