BFRL Program

Reduced Risk of Fire Spread in Wildland-Urban Interface Communities

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Wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires occur when wildland fires cannot be controlled, often due to extreme wind and fuel conditions, and spread into communities. These fires occur worldwide. In the last ten years, significant damage from WUI fires has occurred in the U.S., Australia, and the Mediterranean region. Even with the increased level of risk reduction effort through wildland-fuel treatments, California has suffered two major WUI fire loss events in the last five years. Since little experimental or post-WUI fire analysis has been conducted to evaluate existing risk mitigation approaches for a representative range of WUI environments, their effectiveness is generally unproven (from both a risk reduction and an economic point of view).

Destructive WUI fires often occur over large scales and in extreme environmental conditions that are difficult to reproduce experimentally or measure with field deployable instrumentation. This presents significant challenges to effective modeling, experimental, and field based research.

The overall objective of this program is to evaluate and improve the tools used by communities, homeowners, and fire officials to effectively and economically reduce damages and improve safety in WUI fires. Improved tools are being constructed via advances in measurement science developed through collaborative and synergistic projects involving laboratory and field measurement, post-fire analysis, physics-based fire behavior modeling, economic cost analysis models, and workshops with stakeholders.

This program will lead to reduction of costs due to WUI fires by providing the measurement science to develop and evaluate new standard test methods, building codes, and structure retrofitting techniques. Similarly, the adoption of improved and tested WUI community-scale risk assessment and mitigation methodologies will lead to reduced damages and improved emergency responder safety. Stakeholders include homeowners, homeowner associations, city fire departments, federal and state fire officials, building material manufacturers, homebuilders, standards organizations, and fire researchers.

Component Projects:

• Measuring the Fire Resilience of Wildland-Urban Interface Economies at the Community-Scale

• Experimental Investigation of Structural Ignition in Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires

• Fires in the Wildland-Urban Interface - Development of an outdoor-scale fire model

• Wildland Urban Interface Fire Behavior – Post Fire Analysis

• Decision Aids for Wildland/Urban Interface Firefighters

Contact:
William Mell
(301) 975-4797
ruddy@nist.gov

 

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