Supplies of fire retardant are ample despite copious amounts of the red-tinted slurry being dropped on Colorado wildfires.

“We have no concerns at all about supplies,” said Edward Goldberg, fire safety business director for ICL Performance Products, the contracted supplier to the federal government.

Slurry bombers and helicopters flying out of Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County have dropped more than 653,000 gallons of retardant this fire season. That total already is four times the amount typically dropped in a year.

The majority has been used on the High Park fire west of Fort Collins.

“That’s a lot of retardant for one base for an entire season, much less for one fire,” said Shirley Zylstra, program leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s Wildland Fire Chemicals Program.

ICL Performance Products is making regular deliveries of liquid retardant concentrate to the Jefferson County airport from a plant in southeast Idaho.

At the airport, each gallon of phosphate-derived concentrate is mixed with 5½ gallons of water. Once dropped by planes or helicopters, the slurry inhibits trees and vegetation from emitting flammable gases that enable combustion.

“We’re busy right now in Colorado, but we’re not busy everywhere else,” Goldberg of ICL said. “Even if we were busy everywhere, we have a completely adequate supply.”

Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com