IMHO because there’s no factual answer; could have gone in Cafe Society, but I’m asking for plausible physical speculation based on established super powers.
Anyway…best I can come up with it to get a really big steel plate and drag it, flat (like a knife spreading butter) over the front edge of fast-moving grass and brush fires.
Once a pine forest is fully engulfed, I don’t think even Superman can do anything. But stopping fast-spreading smaller fires…maybe?
(In 60’s bad comic books he’d use his super-breath and blow the fires out like a kid blowing out a birthday candle. Um…no.)
He could use his heat vision to do controlled burns (presumably working with firefighters).
He could dig trenches.
He could maybe go supersonic and perhaps shock some fire out? Does that work?
He could carry containers of water / fire retardant chemicals much more quickly than firefighting planes. I’d assume he could probably do the work of hundreds of those planes.
He could uproot trees to create fire breaks.
He could possibly create whirlwinds, sucking embers back into the fire?
He could carry icebergs from the arctic and melt them with his heat vision to moisten specific areas.
In at least a few of the early comics, IIRC, Superman possessed the technology to send things to the Phantom Zone (e.g., he sent Mon-El there). There must be possibilities with that.
I recall one issue of World’s Finest comics from the 1960s where Superman took a silo and filled it with vinegar and baking soda to douse a forest fire(Batman and Robin, his co-stars in WF, used extinguishers on outlying areas). I’m sure the writer got the idea from chemical fire extinguishers, but if Superman is gong to be carrying around large cylinders full of fire suppressants I’m sure there are better choices to use. In any event, Supes could deliver large quantities of airborne chemicals to douse fires – larger quantities than helicopters and small planes do, and he could do it faster.
Some versions of Superman are essentially infinitely fast, so anything a team of firefighters could do over the course of a week, he could do in minutes. I like the idea of freezing the fire, though – inhale and compress lots of air, fly through some icebergs to disperse the heat, and the resulting breath will be very, very cold.
Grab an iceberg from the ocean in Arctic/Antarctic, drop it over the fire, and while it’s still in the air, smash it into lots of small pieces that fall all over the fire. Repeat until fire goes out.
The trouble with blowing at a fire is that it increases the oxygen going to the fire. That’s why we use bellows to pump up the fire in the fireplace.
I don’t think super-breath would be super-cold. If he took a deep breath and compressed it in his lungs, it would be very HOT in there, and cool off again to ambient temperature when he blew it out. I suppose he could inhale deeply, and then wait a few hours for the heat to dissipate, then blow.
Some super ideas here. I am guessing that carrying immense barrels of water is probably the best. Heat-vision to ignite counter-fires is good: he’d be able to target this more accurately than we mere humans can. Ploughing fire breaks is akin to what I first envisioned. Knocking down trees to remove them as fuel is also nifty.
Captain Marvel, the real one, put out an atomic fire once. He picked up this huge piece of land that was on fire and then flew it into space, or something like that. It was an atomic fire so nothing else worked.
I was thinking along the same lines. However, I read or saw somewhere that when it came to extinguishing fires that Saddam set in Kuwait, explosions were the solution.
[quote] In fighting a fire at a directly vertical spewing wellhead, high explosives, such as dynamite were used to create a blast wave that pushes the burning fuel and local atmospheric oxygen away from the well. (This is a similar principle to blowing out a candle.)[quote]
The other thing to consider is the collateral damage. Drop a zillion gallons of water to douse it but wait, how many people were washed away? You put out the fire but innocents in the neighborhood were killed by your solution.
