Saw someone complaining that the LA wildfires are wasting their time dropping 'Red Phosphorous' on the fires when seawater is right there. Because of course, suddenly all the usual suspects are 'experts' in wildfire fighting. The red stuff is Phos-Chek - that's a brand name en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phos-C… It's a formulation that does multiple things, the water helps put the fire out, there's retardants in there to make it harder for the fire to propagate, and fertilizers that will aid in regrowth. Why is regrowth important? Because when landscapes have been scoured by wildfire it increases the potential for mud slides when the rains do come, the sooner vegetation gets a foothold the less chance there is of a secondary disaster like what happened in Montecito pulitzercenter.org/stories/c… Anyway, there's also federal rules about what kind of retardants can be used on federal lands, and that kinda forces local agencies to comply since they don't want to be swapping out loads depending on whether the fire is on federal, state, county or private lands.