Software Can Model How a Wildfire Will Spread (economist.com)

The rapid flames that roached densely populated areas in Mati, a seaside resort near Athens on July 23, could have been avoided. Gavriil Xanthopoulos, a wildfire expert at Greece's Ministry of Rural Development and Food, believes the unfortunate incident could have been averted if proper use had been made in advance of fire-simulation software [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Fed with data on the area's vegetation, building materials, paved surfaces, paths to the sea and weather patterns, such software would have suggested, he says, those places where trees and brush should have been removed, roads widened and evacuation paths built -- not to mention how zoning laws could have been better devised in the face of fire risk. Greece, Dr Xanthopoulos laments, has been slow to adopt such software. Others are not so dilatory. America's Forest Service, for instance, uses a model developed by Esri, a geographic-information firm in Redlands, California, to assess fire risk. This model feeds on data on the distribution and types of trees, bushes and other vegetable ground cover, and on construction materials used in an area.

These data are collected mainly by satellites and aircraft, but rangers and crews of firefighters contribute detail from the ground. According to Chris Ferner, a wildland-fire technology specialist at Esri, even entering the diameters of tree trunks and the sites of clogged culverts (which alter patterns of water flow) is grist to the software's accuracy. Once a piece of fire-forecasting software such as Esri's knows how much inflammable stuff there is on the land, it can bring in data on rainfall, snowfall, sunshine, temperature and the like, to work out how this might change in the future, as well as how much moisture the vegetation holds. It can also take into account past fires and the lie of the land.

Comments

Software Simulation is Useful

[thebes]

News at 11.

Firefighting crews in Canada routinely use fire behavior prediction software.

Article seems to get it backwards

[imidan]

We've been doing fire modeling for many years. It starts very simply, with the fire triangle: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Then we start adding in concepts more likely to affect wildfire. Heavy spring precipitation leads to more vegetation growth, and when followed by a dry, hot summer, creates a buildup of fuel. Topography is important because fire more readily spreads up a hill than down it. Add in weather data like wind patterns. Previously burned areas are less likely to burn right away because they're cleared of fuel. And so on. We add variables and test the model, gradually improving it over time.

These models are run all the time, and we're familiar with the results. It's a little bit odd to say that a fire simulation would have showed us that we need to widen paved areas or clear brush near buildings, though. Of course it's going to tell us that, because we designed the model with that information in the first place. When we model the risk of a building burning, one of the inputs to the model is the vegetation density near the building, and another is the clear area around the building. We put those in there because they are significant predictors of fire risk.

The problem isn't that people don't know there's fire risk. It's that they don't want to mitigate the risk because it will disturb the natural appearance or historic attributes of the site, or it will be time consuming and expensive, or despite risk assessments they don't take the possibility of fire seriously, or ... .

Re:Article seems to get it backwards

[Strider-]

Exactly. The USFS (United States Forest Service) has or at least had a supercomputer cluster for modeling wildfire behaviour well over a decade ago.

Re:I'll be impressed

[another_twilight]

or firehawks (there's something like 5 species of Australian raptor that spreads fire by carrying burning debris past firebreaks as part of a pack hunting strategy. Not news to the Indigenous population, but it's taken a while for the rest of us to pay attention)

Use tech to fight fires

[myid]

Why aren't they using more tech to fight fires?

1) In California, a firefighter was killed by a falling tree. I wish robots had been used; I'd rather see a robot killed than a man. Also a bulldozer driver was killed, when his vehicle overturned. Couldn't they drive the bulldozer remotely?

If current robots can't travel on rough ground, or if they can't carry and use firefighting tools, or if driving a bulldozer remotely doesn't give an accurate feel of how steep and slick the ground is, then let's improve our technology so that it will work.

There are remote-controlled robots that can climb stairs. Let's put a camera, mike and speaker on one of them, and send it into a burning building. The robot would search for people, and for a safe exit path for the people.

A firefighter would stay safely out of the building, controlling the robot. He would "see" the inside of the building via the camera that's on the robot. And he could talk to any people in the building via the mike and speaker that are on the robot.

If someone in the building could walk, then the firefighter (speaking thru the robot) could tell the person, "Follow the robot; it will lead you out of the building." If the person was injured, and if the robot could bear some weight, then the person could lean on the robot as they exited the building. If someone was trapped, and if the robot could extract him/her, then even better.

2) I'd love to see a team of chemists and experienced firefighters get together, and figure out a new, better way to put out fires. I don't mean to be sarcastic, but if it takes several days to put out a wildfire, then we need to figure out a better way to put it out.

The chemists would be the experts in removing heat, fuel and oxygen from the fire. The firefighters would share their experience of what the environment is, when fighting a fire. They would say that a solution sounds good, but it won't work because in a real fire, the environment is too crowded, too windy, whatever.

Re:Use tech to fight fires

[drinkypoo]

a bulldozer driver was killed, when his vehicle overturned. Couldn't they drive the bulldozer remotely?

There's no reason to use a remotely operated dozer to fight fires which doesn't also apply to every other use of a dozer. But doing that would be massively expensive, so we don't do that with any of them. Sadly, it is cheaper to hire another dozer driver. The most common causes of deaths of dozer operators are 1) rolling the dozer with them in it (or just sliding down a hill so far and fast that they are killed) or 2) parking the dozer and then walking around below it, and the soil shifting and the dozer falling on them.

There are remote-controlled robots that can climb stairs. Let's put a camera, mike and speaker on one of them, and send it into a burning building. The robot would search for people, and for a safe exit path for the people.

We do this already, though not so much in fires and more in structures in danger of collapse. In fires, we also want someone who can swing an ax, or carry an unconscious human. So we risk humans. Eventually when we have robots capable of doing all those jobs, we may switch to robots.

I'd love to see a team of chemists and experienced firefighters get together, and figure out a new, better way to put out fires. I don't mean to be sarcastic, but if it takes several days to put out a wildfire, then we need to figure out a better way to put it out.

Fire has becoming even more unpredictable than it always has been. Back in the Valley Fire seasoned firefighters were literally saying that the fires were exhibiting behaviors they've never seen before. Lately the big problem has been the increased incidence of fire tornadoes. They are created by winds which are created by fire, and filled with burning fuel of varying granularity all the way up to chunks of flaming wood the size of charcoal briquettes, which can be distributed across sizable areas by the tornadoes in question. This enables the fires to jump breaks that they would otherwise be unlikely to cross.

The chemists would be the experts in removing heat, fuel and oxygen from the fire. The firefighters would share their experience of what the environment is, when fighting a fire. They would say that a solution sounds good, but it won't work because in a real fire, the environment is too crowded, too windy, whatever.

Yeah, that's exactly what they say. When you have a big fire, you can reasonably do three things. You can concentrate on not letting it spread, you can smother it, or you can cool it. Consuming its oxygen doesn't usually work, especially once it's large, for the aforementioned reason that they create their own weather. They create heat updrafts which draw in more air, and if you consume the air that the fire is using, it's largely irrelevant because more air will rush in. Consuming the air before it got to the fire would essentially require another massive fire. You can try to consume the air by bombing, which does sometimes work, but note that the only reason that the Swedes were able to bomb their fire is that the fire was actually on a bombing range and there were no repercussions to bombing it some more.

This doesn't mean the problem can't be solved, but it does help explain why even though a lot of effort is spent on researching fire suppression, it doesn't often produce a lot of results. In the end, the best approach to fighting fires is to stop fighting fires. The natives of California deliberately set fires every year. These fires kept down both undergrowth that permits fire to spread r

Re:Incredible

[Slugster]

Artificial Incineration you say?...