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After its introduction, the Bambi Bucket was adopted rapidly and Arney estimates SEI has about 95 per cent of the market for buckets used in helicopter firefighting.

“Something like this, certainly I appreciate it,” Arney said of the honour. “But it was totally out of the blue, the last thing I was expecting to see.”

The award is also ” certainly welcome” if he can use it to put some of the spotlight on his team at SEI Industries, the company he founded in Delta, which keeps the distinctive orange-coloured buckets in the forefront of helicopter firefighting.

Vancouver Sun

Arney’s “a-ha” moment came while he was testing industrial-strength underwater airbags at a North Vancouver shipyard for a previous employer.

“I’ve said to others that a lot of invention is by extension,” Arney said, which means being able to look at one thing and envision how a few changes could turn it into something else.

In this case, Arney was testing the airbags — typically filled with compressed air to lift heavy objects under water — by filling them with water and marvelling at how much weight the lightweight bags could contain.

Being familiar with aviation, it got him to thinking, “What would I have to do to that to make it into a firefighting bucket?”

The answer was to devise a simpler valve at the bottom of the fabric bucket to deliver a stream of water rather than the more cumbersome and failure-prone mechanisms in the rigid plastic buckets in use at the time.

Arney devised the design in a flurry of work in a single evening, which was followed by a year of work to come up with a working prototype — which he said illustrates the “one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration” motto of inventors.