Fire fighting and anti-trust Tom Smith

So being a good and fearful home owner, I want to buy some Phos-chek fire retardant that I can spray on my house and surrounding trees and brush in the event of wildfire in my area.  It is said to really work.

This stuff used to be on the market a couple of years ago.  You could order it in a five-gallon buckets, mix it with water, and spray away.  But now it seems to have disappeared.  I can't find it anywhere on the web.  I really wondered, what the heck is going on here?  This is the dry white powder form -- I think it is the LC-95W.  Finally, in frustration, I called the manufacturer in Ontario, California, and a nice woman up there told me that nope, you cannot buy the stuff retail anymore.  I can only buy the stuff through an insurance company.  That is, if I want fire retardant, I have to buy an insurance policy with a company that offers the service of coming out to your house to spray retardant on it.  Needless to say, this service ain't cheap.

I can see various ways to look at this, but I wonder if this sort of tying arrangement is even legal.  It also seems counter-productive to me to keep powerful fire fighting technology away from the homeowner masses just so insurance companies have something to sell.  But mostly, it just annoys me that I can't buy the technology I want.  I am perfectly capable of spraying this stuff on my trees, which ain't rocket science, and better my doing it than chewing my nails off wondering if my insurance company is going to show up before the fire does.  The retardant is long lasting.  You can apparently put it on weeks before the fire and it's good to go as long as rain doesn't wash it off.  I gather the stuff if pretty benign; it's not like it's some super-toxic chemical that only experts should touch.

Does anybody out there know anything more about this, or know where I could buy some dry non-colored Phos-chek fire retardant or a close substitute?  Is this a legal tying arrangement or more a suspect one?

Comments

[Button]

I don't see why it would be in the insurance company's interest to limit access to something that will save them more money if more people use it.

[Jimbino]

You have to be kidding: if everyone had a spray that eliminated risk, insurance companies would be out of business. Of course they have no interest in reducing risk of loss in general, though they do have an ongoing interest in cherry-picking: spending all their resources in an attempt to find those among the population at lower risk of those losses they have no interest in diminishing in general.